
OassIUlia. 
Book 



PRESENTED IIY 



• 






b 



LECTURES 



UPON TUB 



PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 



BY J6 
WILLIAM G. T. SHEDD, 

BROWN PROFESSOR IN ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY. 



A N D V E R : 
PUBLISHED BY W. F. DRAPER. 

BOSTON: JOHN P. JEWETT & CO. 
NEW YORK : WILEY AND HALSTED. 

PHILADELPHIA: SMITH, ENGLISH AND CO. 

1857. 



plfc 















Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1856, by 

W . F. DRAPER, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



«,i \tV t vavb 



STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BT 
W . F. DRAPER, ANDOVER. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 

INTRODUCTORY NOTE, 5 



LECTURE I. 

THE ABSTRACT IDEA OF HISTORY, 7 

LECTURE II. 

THE NATURE, AND DEFINITION, OF SECULAR HISTORY, . 52 

LECTURE III. 

THE NATURE, AND DEFINITION, OF CHURCH HISTORY, . 77 

LECTURE IV. 

THE VERIFYING TEST IN CHURCH HISTORY 105 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 



The substance of this book was originally written, 
in the winter of 1853^4, as an introduction to courses 
of prelections in the department of Ecclesiastical 
History. This will account for its prevailing reference 
to this department, as well as for the tone of direct 
address which occasionally characterizes it. At the 
same time, it is hoped that the work will be found to 
have a general reference to all species of historical 
inquiry, and may contribute to deepen and widen the 
growing interest in the most comprehensive of the 
sciences. 



Theological Seminary, Andover, \ 
Jan. 2, 1856. j 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 



LECTURE I. 

THE ABSTRACT IDEA OF HISTORY. 

In order to the successful investigation of any sub- 
ject, it is necessary, first of all, to form a comprehen- 
sive and clear conception of its essential nature. — 
Without such an antecedent general apprehension, the 
mind is at a loss where to begin, and which way to 
proceed. The true idea of any object, is a species of 
preparatory knowledge which throws light over the 
whole field of inquiry, and introduces an orderly method 
into the whole course of examination. It is the clue 
which leads through the labyrinth ; the key to the 
problem to be solved. 

It may appear strange and irrational, at first glance, 
to require a knowledge of the intrinsic nature of that 
which is to be examined, in order that it may be ex- 
amined, and before the examination. At first sight, it 
may seem as if this perception of the true idea of a 



8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

thing, should be the result, and not the antecedent, of 
inquiry, and that nothing of an a priori nature should 
be permitted to enter into the investigations of the 
human mind in any department of knowledge. To 
require in the outset a comprehensive idea, of History 
e. g., and then to use this as an instrument of investi- 
gation, seems to invert the true order of things, and to 
convert ignorance into knowledge by some shorter 
method than that of study and reflection. But what 
is the matter of fact ? Does the scientific mind start 
off upon its inquiries in every direction, without any 
pre-conceived ideas as to where it is going, and what 
it expects to find ? Is the human understanding such 
a tabula rasa, that it contributes nothing of its own, 
towards the discovery of truth, but, like the mirror, 
servilely reflects all that is brought before it, without 
regard to reflections and distortions ? We have only 
to watch the movements of our minds to find that we 
carry with us into every field of investigation an an- 
tecedent idea, which gives more or less direction to our 
studies, and goes far to determine the result to which 
we come. We are not now concerned with the 
reasonableness or unreasonableness of this fact; we 
are now only alluding to it as an actual matter of fact 
which appears in the history of every studious and 
reflecting mind. Even if we deem it to be irrational 






THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 9 

and groundless, and for this reason endeavor to do 
away with it in our studies, we find it to be impossible. 
If we begin the study of Philosophy, it is with a 
general conception of its nature ; and one that is con- 
tinually re-appearing in our philosophizing. If we com- 
mence the examination of Christianity itself, we find 
that we already have an idea of its distinctive character 
as a religion, which exerts a very great influence upon 
our inquiry into its constituent elements, and particu- 
larly upon our construction of its doctrines.* The 
demand therefore so constantly made by the Ration- 
alist of every century, that the mind must be entirely 
vacant of a priori ideas and initiating preconceptions ; 
in his phraseology, must be free from " prejudices ; " in 
order that it may make a truly scientific examination, 
is a demand that cannot be complied with, even if 
there were a disposition to do so on the part of the 
inquirer, and is not complied with even on the part of 
him who makes it. "With the origin of such guid- 
ing ideas we have no concern at this time. It is 

* This idea contains such pre-judgments as ; that Christianity is a 
supernatural religion ; that its author is Divine; that its truths are mysteri- 
ous, i, e are infinite, and therefore cannot be exhausted by the finite 
intelligence. Notice that these judgments are a priori ; i. e. they flow 
from the nature of the case. For if Christianity is a religion differing in kind 
from all natural religions, then the above elements are necessarily involved 
in the conception and theory of it. 



10 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

sufficient for our purpose to indicate their actual exist- 
ence in the human mind, and their actual influence 
and operation in all departments of its investigation. 
With the correctness of these ideas, on the contrary, we 
have a much closer concern ; for if they exist in spite 
of all efforts to be rid of them, and make them- 
selves visible in all the investigations of the student, 
and in all the products of his investigation, it is 
certainly of the first importance that they be true 
ideas ; that is, exact correspondents to the real nature 
of things. 

What then is the true idea of History with which 
we should commence our studies and reflections in this 
department of knowledge, and how may we know 
that it is the true idea, and therefore entitled to guide 
our inquiries, and shape our constructions ? The 
correct answer to these questions will constitute the 
Philosophy of History. 

It is now very generally conceded that, in its abstract 
and essential nature, History is Development, and with 
this we agree. The idea of an unfolding is identical 
with that of a history. In thinking of the one, we 
unavoidably think of the other, and this evinces an 
inward coincidence between the two conceptions. 
Unceasing motion, from a given point, through several 
stadia, to a final terminus, is a characteristic belong- 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 11 

ing as inseparably to a historic process as to that of 
any evolution whatsoever. In bringing before our 
minds, the passage of an intellectual or a moral princi- 
ple from one degree of energy and efficiency to another, 
in the history of a nation, or of mankind, we unavoid- 
ably construe it as a continuous and connected career. 
The same law of organic sequence prevails within 
the sphere of mind and of freedom that works in the 
kingdom of matter and of necessity, so that terms 
applied to the connected events and processes of 
the natural world, have a strict application in the 
moral, and a far more significant meaning. The 
phrases, "principles of history," "laws of history," 
" ideas and germs in history," which occur so frequently 
in essays and treatises as to become monotonous, and 
which render the invention of synonymes and cir- 
cumlocutions one of the most difficult of rhetorical ex- 
pedients, all go to prove that the spontaneous concep- 
tion of History is that of a progressive expansion 
from a primitive involution. 

If any one doubts whether such phraseology is any- 
thing more than the play of the fancy, and is inclined 
to believe that there is no actual correspondent, to these 
terms, in the truth and fact of the case, let him ask 
himself the question : " if History has no real and 
solid substance, of the nature of germs, principles, ideas, 



12 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

laws and forces, then what substantial matter has it 
at all ? If these are all unreal, the mere fictions of the 
fancy, with no objective correspondents in that career 
of man on the globe which every one concedes to be a 
reality, and the most solemn of all, then what is the 
real essence of History ? " For throwing out such 
deeper and more vital contents as we are speaking of, 
there remain only the unconnected materials of names, 
dates, and occurrences ; a multitudinous sea of effects 
without causes ; an ocean of phenomena without a 
single supporting ground ; a chaos of atoms with no 
sort of connection or intermingling. A search after 
the truth and substance of the department, in this in- 
stance, as in all others, carries the mind below the 
surface to constituent elements and principles, so that 
it perceives the world of Human History to be, after 
its own kind, as full of germs, laws, and forces, as 
the globe beneath our feet ; and that the property of 
reality ; of forceful influential existence ; is as predi- 
cate of the former as of the latter. 

This essential substance of History is continually 
passing through a motive process. The germ is 
slowly unfolding as it is the nature of all germs to do. 
Egyptian wheat may sleep in the swathes and foldings 
of a mummy, through three thousand springs, but the 
purpose of its creation cannot be thwarted except by 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 



13 



the destruction of its germinal substance. It was 
created to grow, and notwithstanding this long interval 
of slumbering life the development begins the instant 
the moist earth closes over it. In like manner an idea 
which originally belongs to the history of humanity 
may be hindered in its progress, and for ages may 
seem to be out of existence ; yet it is none the less in 
existence and a reality. It is all the while a factor in 
the earthly career of mankind, and the historian who 
should throw it out of the account would misconceive 
and misrepresent the entire historic process. An idea 
of human reason, like popular liberty, e. g., may make 
no external appearance for whole periods, but its re- 
appearance, with an energy of operation heightened by 
its long suppression in the consciousness of nations, is 
the most impressive of all proofs that it has a necessary 
existence in human nature, and is destined to be 
developed. A doctrine of Divine reason, like that of 
justification by Christ's atonement, is a positive truth 
which has been lodged in the christian mind by Divine 
Revelation, and is destined to an universal influence, 
a complete development, in and through the church ; 
notwithstanding that some branches and ages of the 
church have lost it out of their religious experience. — 
Whatever has been inlaid either in matter or in mind 
by the Creator of both, is destined by Him and under 

2 



14 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 

his own superintendence to be evolved ; and of all 
such necessary matter, be it in natural or in moral 
history, we may say, that not a particle of it will be 
annihilated ; it will pass through the predetermined 
stages of an expanding process and obtain a full ex- 
hibition. 

1. Proceeding, then, to the analytic definition of this 
idea of development, which enters so thoroughly into 
the theory and philosophy of History, the first charac- 
teristic that strikes our notice is the necessary connec- 
tion of parts. Isolation is impossible. No single part 
can stand alone and exist by itself. The principle of 
connection binds all together, so that the part exists 
only in and for the whole. Atoms, in the original and 
strict meaning of the term, are no constituents of a 
process of evolution, and the atomic theory can throw 
no light upon such a process. The atom, by the very 
etymology, is entirely disconnected from all besides 
itself. Matter has been cut down, ideally, to that infini- 
tesimal point at which it constitutes the very first 
element, and, consequently, is now out of all connec- 
tion, a single independent unit by itself. No such 
element as this, unassimilated and remaining so, can 
be a rudimental part in a development. Nothing that 
asserts an isolated existence, and obstinately refuses 
to enter into connections, can go into an evolution. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 15 

The atomic particles of a heap of sand, e. g., can never 
be part or particle of a process of growth, because each 
exists by and for itself. A rope of sand is the symbol 
of disconnection. 

If now we test History by this first characteristic 
of a development, do we not find exact agreement be- 
tween the two conceptions ? History is a continuous 
line of connections. "We can no more conceive of a 
true break or perfect disconnection in it, than in the 
current of a river. Though it naturally divides into 
periods and ages, distinguished from each other by 
epochal points, yet there is no separation at these 
points. The epoch itself, like a living joint in the 
human frame, is itself a tie by which the parts 
are articulated together and constitute one con- 
tinuous organism. It is as impossible to find a real 
break and absolute disconnection in History, as in 
nature. In nature, nothing but a miracle can stop the 
onward flow of a stream and wall up the waters on 
each side of a dry space in its channel, and nothing 
but a new fiat of creative power could now sever the 
human race into two halves, each of which should be 
entirely separate from the other, and between which 
there should be no more reciprocity of connection and 
influence than there now is between the angelic hosts 
and the human race. As the Historian follows the 



16 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

line backwards up toward the point of beginning, he 
finds the succeeding linked to the preceding, civiliza- 
tion joining on upon civilization, arts and inven- 
tions clinging to arts and inventions further up the 
line, literatures and religions tied to preceding ones ; 
in short, he never comes to a point where there are no 
connected antecedents until he reaches the beginning 
of human history, where the basis for the whole pro- 
cess was laid by a fiat, supernatural, and creative.* 

2. The second characteristic of a development is 
the natural connection of parts. The sequence is not 
arbitrary and capricious ; mere juxtaposition without 
any rational coherence. The two parts that are con- 
nected have a mutual adaptation to each other. The 
one was evidently intended to succeed the other, and 
the other evidently prepares for, and expects, the one. 
There is, consequently, nothing strange or whimsical 
in a genuine evolution, either in the sphere of nature 
or of spirit. Everything advances with a tranquil 
uniformity that precludes startling and unexpected 
changes, because each and every part is a preparation 

* Back of the creative act there is no development. History is in 
time solely, and pertains solely to the finite and created. It implies 
succession and evolution, and therefore cannot pertain to a Being who, 
unlike his works, is not subject to unfolding processes of any kind, but is 
" the same, yesterday, to-day, and forever." 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 17 

for that which is to come. Any movement in nature 
is always impressive from the perfect serenity with 
which it proceeds. Be it on a small, or on a large 
scale, be it the blowing of a rose, or the gorgeous 
death of the forest after the bloom and fulness of 
summer, the process is as quiet as Spring, as still as 
Autumn. 

Were connection in an evolution unnatural, were it 
whimsical and capricious, the impression made by it 
would be very different from what it actually is. — 
That fortuitous connection of parts, of which atheism 
in ancient and in modern times makes so much, is 
incompatible with the doctrine of development. — 
This latter requires natural and adapted connection, 
and hence a presiding intelligence that sees and pre- 
pares the end from the beginning. It is indeed true, 
that the idea which we are analyzing has been em- 
ployed in an atheistic manner, and enters largely into 
all pantheistic methods. Of this we shall speak here- 
after, and against it, we shall endeavor to guard, when 
examining the limitations and applications of the 
idea. But even at this point in the discussion, it is very 
obvious, that provided the basis and germ of the 
evolution is not supposed to be self-originated, but is 
referred to the fiat of a Creator who is entirely above 
it, and out of it, and the absolute disposer of it ; provided 



18 THE PHILOSOPHY O F HISTORY. 

it is regarded as a pure creation from nothing, then 
the naturalness of the sequences, from that initial point, 
furnishes one of the most convincing arguments 
against the doctrine of chance. Were there merely 
hap-hazard connection without inward coherence, 
there would be no evidence of an adaptive power, and 
an intelligent Author of the process. But seeing, as 
we do, in every genuine evolution, a prophetic antici- 
pation of the succeeding in every element of the pre- 
ceding, beholding, as we do, a calm, and, as it were, 
semi-intelligent progress from point to point, in this 
" thing of life," the notion of fortuity is banished at 
once from the mind. 

If now we test History by this second characteristic 
of a development, we again see the coincidence and 
identity of the two conceptions. Nothing is more- 
natural in its connections than History. Symmetrical 
gradations, expected transitions, anticipated termina- 
tions, appear all along its course. Nothing is abrupt 
and saltatory in the historic movement, but one thing 
follows on after another with all the ease and natural- 
ness of physical growth itself. There are convulsions 
and revolutions in the process, it is true, but they are 
always prepared for. They may indeed, and they 
often do, burst upon the notice of the living actors in 
them with the suddenness and crash of a thunderbolt 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 1 ! ) 

from a clear sky, but it is because the living actors are 
unthinking actors, and give no heed to the significant 
premonitions. The student of History however, the 
reflecting mind that is not so caught in this mighty 
stream of tendency as to be unable to rise above it and 
see the historic preparation, is never startled in this 
manner. He sees the awful preparation in the pre- 
ceding centuries of tyranny, of poverty, of ignorance, 
of irreligion. Upon his mind it is no sudden shoot- 
ing of a meteor from the depths of space into the 
totally black vault of night, but a true sun-rise. For 
him, " far off its coming shone." Yet the student sees 
only what really exists. He does not make history, 
but finds it ; and he finds it, even in its wildest and 
apparently most capricious sections, a genuine unfold- 
ing or series of natural connections. 

3. The third characteristic of a development is the 
organic connection of the parts. In this we reach the 
summit of the series, and arrive at the most signifi- 
cant and fruitful property. For the connection be- 
tween two things may be both necessary and natural, 
and yet not organic. Mechanical connection is such. 
Take, for example, two cog wheels in a machine. — 
Here the parts are necessarily connected ; that is, they 
have no value except in relation to each other. And 
they are naturally connected ; that is, they are adapted 



20 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

by their construction to play into each other. But 
there is no higher bond than this merely external and 
mechanic one. There is connection, but no inter- 
connection. The term " organic," consequently, merits 
fuller examination than either of the others that have 
been employed in the analysis. 

(a) Perhaps no better definition of an organism, 
can be given, than that of Kant. As distinguished 
from a mechanism, he defines it as " a product in which 
each and every part is, reciprocally, means and cndP * 
If we look at the human body, for example, we find 
that each constituent portion must be regarded, now, as 
the sole end for which the whole exists, and, then 
again, as merely the means or instrument by which 
the whole exists. The flesh in one aspect of it, is the 
end for which the functions of respiration, circulation, 
secretion, digestion, and locomotion, are carried on. — 
In one view of them, all these great processes have for 
their sole object this clothing of the immortal with its 
mortality. And yet we see again, that the production 
of this tissue is itself only a means whereby these 
systems of respiration, circulation, digestion, and secre- 
tion, are themselves kept in operation. The whole 
body exists for the eye, as truly as the eye exists for 
the whole body ; for if this, or any other, member be 

* Urtheilskraft, § 65. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 21 

maimed or mutilated, the entire vital force of the 
organism is at once subsidized and set to work to 
repair the injury. It is this reciprocity in the relation 
of the parts, that betokens the organic connection. — 
It is this existence of the part for the whole, and of 
the whole for the part, that sets an organism so much 
higher up the scale of existence than a mechanism. 

An organic development, consequently, be it within 
the sphere of nature or of mind, is one in which all 
the elements and agencies mutually relate to each 
other, and mutually influence each other. Intercom- 
munication, intermingling, action and re-action ; these 
and such like, are the terms that set our thoughts upon 
the trail of such a constantly shifting and changing 
process as that of an expanding germ. For it is be- 
cause the conception, which we are endeavoring to 
define, is so full of pliant, elastic, and interfusing, 
properties, that it is so difficult to fix it in language. 
It is because the word " development," is so allied to 
that other most inexplicable word " life," that a writer 
has done the best that can be done, if, by his approxi- 
mate statements, he has merely wakened the mind to 
an intimation of the meaning, and set it musing upon 
the suggestive but mysterious thought. 

(b) Again, this action and re-action, this intercon- 
nection and intermingling, implies inward and unceas- 



22 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

ing- motion in an organism. Whenever a development 
comes to a total stop it comes to a dead stop. — 
Movement is inseparable from the conception, and 
hence the adjective " progressive " is always connected 
with the substantive, either expressly or by ellipsis. — 
The notion of an incessant flux and reflux of the 
elements and properties, is as inseparable from the 
idea of an evolution, as it is incompatible with that 
of artificial composition. In the instance of mechani- 
cal production, the motion is all ab extra ; in the mind 
of the workman. His work, after all that his inven- 
tive genius has done to it, is as hard, immobile, and 
internally dead, as it ever was. It has in it nothing 
of an expansion, because the living principle by which 
it was originated is not in it, but in the mind of the 
mechanic. This, it is true, is a living thing, a living 
soul, but it is unable to breathe itself, as a principle of 
growth and formation, into its rigid, wooden or metallic 
product. The story of Pygmalion and his statue is 
still a fable. The "breathing" marble, and the 
" glowing " canvas are still, and ever, figures of 
speech. No product of finite power can be organic ; for 
there is no pervasive moulding of the elements, no 
assimilation of the rudiments, no internal stir and fu- 
sion, in the work of the creature. 

(c) Again, an organic process implies potentiality, 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 23 

as the basis of it. It is of importance, at this point, to 
direct attention to the distinction between a creation 
and a development, and thereby preclude the panthe- 
istic employment of the latter idea. A development 
is simply the unfolding of that which has been previ- 
ously folded up, and not the origination of entity from 
non-entity. The growth of a germ is not the creation 
of it, but is merely the expansion of a substance 
already existing. All attempts, therefore, to explain 
the origin of the universe by the doctrine of develop- 
ment or expansion, like the Indian Cosmogony, drive 
the mind back from point to point in a series of secon- 
dary evolutions, still leaving the inquiry after the 
primary origin and actual beginning of things un- 
answered. For it is not creation, but only emanation, 
when the world is regarded as the unfolding of an 
eternal potency. Such a conception as this latter, is, 
moreover, metaphysically absurd, for the idea of un- 
developed being has no rational meaning except in re- 
ference to the temporal and the finite. Progressive 
evolution within the Divine nature, would imply a 
career for the Deity in which He was passing from 
less to more perfect stages of existence, and would 
thus bring Him within the realm of the relative and 
conditioned. Latency is necessarily excluded from 
the Eternal One, by virtue of that absolute perfection 



24 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

and metaphysical self-completeness whereby his being 
is " without variableness or shadow of turning."* His 
uncreated essence is incapable of self-expanding pro- 
cesses, and hence the created universe must be of a 
secondary essence which is the pure make of his 
sheer fiat. To the question, therefore, which still and 
ever returns ; " how does this potential basis come 
into existence ? to what, or to whom, do these germs 
of future and unceasing processes owe their origin ? " 
the theist gives but one answer. He applies the 
doctrine of creation out of nothing, to all germinal 
substance whatsoever. 

For the Deity, though self-complete and incapable 
of development himself, has yet made that which is 
potential and destined to an unfolding. He has 
created a universe that is full of latent powers and 
agencies. The works of his hand not only display 
excellence in the very first moments of their existence, 
but reveal a still more marvellous excellence as they 
unfold and evolve their interior capacities. The 
whole progress of natural science is a gaze of admi- 
ration, and should be an anthem of adoration, towards 

* The whole fabric of modern Pantheism rests upon this petitioprmcipii, 
viz : that the doctrine of development has the same legitimate applica- 
tion within the sphere of the Infinite and Eternal, that it has within that 
of the Finite and Temporal. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 25 

an Architect who has inlaid that which is still more 
wonderful than what appears on the surface ; who 
has provided in the single, instantaneous, creative, act 
of his omnipotence, for an evolution which is to run on 
under his own superintendence * through all coming 
ages, until stopped by the same miraculous fiat. — 
In this property of potentiality, thus strictly defined 
and distinguished, we have one of the most absolute 
essentials of a development. If this conception is un- 
real, then is that of evolution. If we cannot conceive 
of,, and believe in, the previous creation and deposit 
of a material, in order that it may be used at a future 
time, of the implanting of a principle which is to mani- 
fest itself, it may be, ages ahead, of the predetermina- 
tion of a process and a preparation for it long before it 
becomes an actuality ; if all such ideas as these are 
visionary, and all such thinking as this has no corres- 
pondent in the world of reality ; then the idea of an 
organic development is inconceivable and absurd. — 
The best argument in its favor, however, would be to 
throw it all away, by thinking it all away, and then 

* It is obvious to remark here, that at no point in its history can a 
created existence become self-subsistent. Hence all processes of devel- 
opment muft be regarded as conducted beneath a maintaining energy 
from God, which, in technical phrase, is Providence in distinction from 
Creation. The predeterminati m of the process, and the preparation for 
it, in the same technical phraseology is the Divine Decree. 



26 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

seriously ask the question, " what solid thing is now 
left either in the created universe of nature or of 
mind?" Expel the fact of potency, of latent powers 
and principles, from the sphere of the Created, in which 
alone as we have remarked above it has any applica- 
tion, and nothing is left but the phenomena of the 
instant, or a world of shadows and spectra. 

(d) Finally, an organic development implies, 
identity and sameness of original substance in all the 
phenomenal changes that accompany the expanding 
process. Those who have confounded the idea 
which we are defining, with that of creation, have also 
misapprehended it at this point. The gradual advance 
in an evolution from something old to something new, 
is not a progress to something absolutely new ; i. e., 
new in the sense of never having had any sort of exist- 
ence before. A development can never produce any- 
thing absolutely aboriginal. The Creator alone can 
do this, and he does it when by his fiat he calls the 
germ with all its potentiality into being. An evolu- 
tion cannot add an iota to the sum of created substance. 
It is confined, by the supernatural and creative power 
that called its germ into existence, to a predetermined 
course and task; which is simply, and purely, and 
exactly, to put forth what has been put in, to evolve 
just what has been involved. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 27 

It follows, consequently, that the progressive advance 
and unfolding which is to be seen all along the line 
of a development, is simply the expansion over a wider 
surface of that which from the instant of its creation has 
existed in a more invisible and metaphysical form. The 
progress or gain is formal and not material, external 
and not internal, visible and not invisible. Whether 
we take a seed like the acorn, or an entity like the 
human race, it is evident that development can create 
no new primary substance, or essential principle, in 
either. The utmost which the vivific life in each 
instance can do, is to assimilate already existing ma- 
terials in order to its own manifestation. The last- 
individual oak preserves its identity of substance, and 
sameness of essential principle, with the first acorn, 
and the generations of individual men are not, so 
many hundred millions of repetitions of the creative 
act, but merely a serial exhibition of the result of the 
single fiat in Eden ; of the one human species, or com- 
mon substance of humanity, with the origin of which, 
the creation of man, as distinguished from his propaga- 
tion, commenced and terminated. For if, on the one 
hand, there were an annihilation and subtraction of 
the old aboriginal matter, or, on the other, a creation 
and addition of a new, there would be a departure 
from the archetype, and the tree would be another 



28 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

than the oak, and the individual would not be a true 
specimen of humanity. But such deviations are pre- 
cluded ; for this potential basis, from which the organic 
development starts, is the involution that contains, not 
only all the essential substance of the process, but also 
the law by which it is to be evolved and exhibited ; so 
that while there is unceasinsr change and constant 
advance in the outward manifestation, there is perfect 
identity and sameness in the inward essence. 

Passing, now, from the tangled wilderness of analy- 
tic definition, into the level and open fields of appli- 
cation and illustration ; if we test History by this 
third characteristic of a development, we shall see 
more plainly than ever, that the two conceptions agree 
with each other. History is certainly characterized by 
reciprocal action in its elements. Ideas, principles, 
laws, forces, events, and men, are constantly acting 
and reacting upon each other from the beginning to 
the end of a historic process. Everything influences 
everything. Everything receives influence from every- 
thing. It is impossible to make a separation between 
the factors, so that this interaction and intermingling 
shall stop at a given point. Take a single feature of 
Secular History, for illustration the Political Revolu 
tions, and see how this law of reciprocal action prevails 
The idea of liberty, promulgated in one nation be- 



THK PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 29 

comes the realized fact in another, and the realized fact, 
again, becomes the stimulating example which wakes 
the slumbering idea in a third. A treatise on govern- 
ment by Sydney in the seventeenth century and in 
monarchical England, finds its realization in the 
eighteenth century in the American Constitution. — 
This concrete example repasses the Atlantic, and be- 
comes the mightiest of the forces that convulse the 
old feudal monarchy of France, and the most influen- 
tial of the agencies at work in Europe for the political 
elevation of the masses. But that treatise of Sydney 
itself, was not merely the propagator of influences ; it 
was the recipient of a most mighty influence coming 
down from the remote past. The currents of Greek 
and Roman Republicanism flowed through the Eng- 
lish Republican. The political brain of Plato and 
Aristotle, of Brutus the Consul and Brutus the Patriot, 
was the brain in the heart of Sydney. 

If we look at any of the processes in the natural 
world, do we find any more convincing proofs of 
interaction and reciprocity of agencies, than we find 
in the world of human society? If the terms action 
and reaction are not figurative in the former sphere, are 
they not full of the most solid meaning in the latter? 
And is it not the true end and aim of the student of 
history, to make this play of living agencies and influ- 

3* 



30 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

ences as real to his own mind and feelings, as its cor- 
respondent is to the student of nature ? The modern 
naturalist cannot for a moment believe that nature is 
a mechanism, and that organism is a fiction and 
metaphor in this realm. A thousand treatises, each a 
thousand times more ingenious than that one in which 
Des Cartes* attempts to demonstrate that all so-called 
vital forces in the lower animals are in reality mechan- 
ical ones, and that the body of the brute is as much 
an artificial production as a watch, could not for an 
instant interrupt the sure belief of the natural philoso- 
pher, that the physical world exhibits in all parts of it 
a process of organic expansion, and that natural objects 
are the products of a law of life and growth. The 
conviction that there is an internal and not merely 
fanciful analogy between the worlds of nature and of 
mind, so that the same fundamental law of expansion 
prevails in both, should firmly possess the mind of 
the inquirer in the department of human history. — 
The relation between the subjective principle and the 
outward stimuli is precisely the same in one instance 
as in the other. Is there any more real reciprocal 
relation between the tropical Fauna or Flora, and 
the temperature, amount of atmospheric moisture, 

* "He denied the supermaterialism of animal life as many are now 
denying the supernaturalism of Christianity." Twesten's Dogmatik.I. 318. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 31 

elevation of the land above the sea, prevailing winds, 
amount of sun light, geological formation, and soil, 
of the tropical regions ; than there is between the 
Celtic, Gothic, and Roman components of national 
character, the insular isolating residence, the influence 
of Greek and Roman literatures, of commerce, of the 
Christian religion, of the intestine wars of the Roses 
and the wars for foreign conquest ; between all these 
historical elements and agencies ; and the historical 
development of England ? Ought not the analysis 
and contemplation of this reciprocity of agencies to 
produce the same sense of organic connections, the 
same fresh feeling of a living process, and the same 
enthusiastic wonder, with which the naturalist exam- 
ines material nature ; with which a Gilbert White 
minutely surveys physical nature within the limits of 
his rural parish ; with which a Humboldt surveys the 



cosmos 



9 * 



*" Those truths are always most valuable which are most historical, 
that is, which tell us most about the past and future states of the object 
to which they belong. In a tree, for instance, it is more important to 
give the appearance of energy and elasticity in the limbs which is indi- 
cative of growth and life, than any particular character of leaf, or texture 
of bough. It is more important that we should feel that the uppermost 
sprays are creeping higher and higher into the sky, and be impressed 
with the current of life and motion which is animating every fibre, than 
that we should view the exact pitch of relief with which those fibres are 



04, THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

Again, is not History like any other organic devel- 
opment, characterized by an inward and unceasing 
movement ? Is there any stagnation or immobility 
in it? Seize the process of human life at any point 
you please, and do you not find it stirring like a force 
and beating like a pulse? Even the most externally 
motionless period has its fierce passions and intense 
emotions. The darkest of the Dark Ages, the more it 
is studied, the more is it seen to have a human interest. 
The most stagnant stratum of the Dead Sea undulates. 
It has been said that the savage has no history; that 
there is in this form of society only a dead monotony 
unenlivened by the play of human feelings and the 
struggle of human passions. But this is not so. — 
As, according to Dr. Johnson, the biography of 
the most unimportant individual on the globe, were 

thrown out against the sky. For the first truths tell us tales ahout the 
tree, ahout what it has been, and will be, while the last are characteristic 
of it only in its present state, and are in no way talkative about them- 
selves. Talkative facts are always more interesting and more import- 
ant than silent ones. So again the lines in a crag which mark its strati- 
fication, and how it has been washed and rounded by water, or twisted 
and drawn out in fire, are more important, because they tell more than 
the stains of the lichens which change year by year, and the accidental 
fissures of frost or decomposition ; not but that both of these are histori- 
cal, but historical in a less distinct manner and for shorter periods." 
— Modern Painters, I. chap. vi. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 33 

it fully written out so that the life should appear 
just and fully as it was, would overflow with interest 
and entertainment for all men, so the real every-day 
life of even a savage horde would be an addition to 
Universal History that would waken earnest attention. 
Who would not eagerly peruse the history of a noma- 
dic Tartar tribe, if it were written with the simple and 
minute fidelity of a chronicle of Froissart?* Who 
would not even spare some of the more outwardly im- 
posing sections of General History, if in their place he 
could have a true unvarnished tale of the wanderings 
of one of those Scythian or Celtic races who were the 
first to come westward from Central Asia, the birth- 
place and cradle of mankind ? What a charm and a 
light would be thrown over the earlier history of 
Greece and Rome, if a veritable account of one or 
more branches of that great Pelasgic race ; that savage 
source of " the Beauty that was Greece and the 
Grandeur that was Rome" should be discovered 
among the manuscripts of a cloister? 

But the secret of the charm, which is thus felt in 
any and every section of human history, lies in the fact 
that there is an unceasing movement, an incessant 
stir and fermentation, in each and every section. The 

* One of the most unique and thrilling papers of De Quincey is " The 
flight of a Tartar Tribe." 



84 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

ocean itself is not more unresting than the history of 
man. The oceanic currents are not more distinct and 
unmistakable than those streams of tendency which 
sway eastward and westward, northward and south- 
ward, in the migration of nations, in the rise and de- 
cline of civilizations, in the founding and fall of 
empires, in the alternations of national glory and 
decay. Motion, both internal and external, is the 
characteristic which first impresses the historical 
student. In passing from other domains of inquiry 
into this, he finds himself to be coming out from quiet 
vales into the region of storms; from the place of 
secured results and garnered products, into the place 
of active preparation and production. In the sphere 
of Poetry, there is only the still air and golden light of 
setting suns. In the sphere of Science, the mind is in 
the serene region of pure thought. But in History, 
the inquirer comes out into the world of agencies, 
actors, and actions, where everything is under motion, 
and, in the Baconian phrase, all "resounds like the 
mines." 

Again, does not History, like any other organic 
process, rest upon a basis of potentiality ? Human 
life is the Old in the New ; the old being in a new 
aspect. History does not create its wealth and variety 
of material as it goes along, but merely expands a 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 35 

varied latency that was originated when the morning 
stars sang together. Potentiality meets us at every 
point, and accounts for the lights and shadows of the 
" pictured page." National differences and peculiarities, 
and consequently all that is unique and distinctive in 
the career of nations, must be referred to a provision 
made therefor in the day of man's creation. Compare 
the Rome of the age of Numa Pompilius with the 
Rome of the age of Augustus Caesar, and while the 
latter displays elements and characteristics that had 
lain so entirely dormant, in preceding sections of this 
national history,that if Rome had gone out of political 
existence in the struggle with the Samnite or the 
Carthaginian the human mind never would have 
known of their existence, yet would they for this 
reason not have been real entities ? It is indeed true, 
that they would not have been manifested, but would 
they not just as really have been rudiments in that 
original political germ or basis for a nation, which, 
whether completely unfolded or not, had a wholeness 
and rounded capacity of its own, because it was an 
integral part of the " good " and perfect creation of 
God, in the day that "the Lord God formed man of 
the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils 
the breath of life ? " A potential existence is by no 
means an imaginary or fictitious one. A germ may 



36 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

not be permitted to run its course of evolution, and 
display all its marvellous inlay of elements and indi- 
viduals ; but it is none the less a fixed quantity by 
itself, and must be estimated by what it was primarily 
endowed with by the Creator. If a race should be 
stopped short in mid-career, by the same fiat that 
created it in the beginning, its dignity and standing 
in the scale of universal being would have to be de- 
termined by its created capacities; not by what had 
actually come forth, but by what had been originally 
put in ; by the amount of life and the quantum of 
varied latency that had been primarily summed up 
in it. 

It is by virtue of this potential basis that History 
exhibits that union of two opposite properties, perma- 
nence and progression, which is so baffling to the 
mind. It has a permanent identity and sameness, 
because it exhibits the same species of being and the 
same eternal truth in all its sections. It also presents 
a constant variety and change, because it shows this 
same human nature, and this same common verity, 
in new forms. Each age and period is as fresh and 
original in its appearance, as if it were the first in the 
series, and looked upon the new earth for the first 
time that it was ever looked upon, and lived the first 
human life that ever was lived. This co-inherence 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 61 

and co-working of the two factors, of the Old and the 
New, of the Conservatism and the Progress, is the very 
essence of History. It is difficult, we are aware, to 
seize and hold both conceptions at one and the same 
time, as the constant debate between the man of Con- 
servatism and the man of Progress shows. It is easy 
and natural to separate what God has joined together, 
and to make choice of the one or of the other charac- 
teristic, as the key to all History and the foundation 
of all practical life and action. It is simpler to say 
that History is permanent without progress, or else 
that it is progressive without permanence, than to say 
that it is a true development and therefore both perma- 
nent and progressive. The extremists upon both sides 
have a much easier task than the one who occupies 
the central position between them. A simple idea is 
much easier to define and manage than a complex 
one. But it is not so fertile, so prolific, or so com- 
pletely true. If simplicity and facility of management 
were all that the philosopher has to care for, the great 
comprehensive ideas of science would soon disappear ; 
for they are neither uncomplex nor facile. " The 
simplest of governments," says Webster while defend- 
ing the excellent complexity of republicanism, " is a 
despotism." The simplest of theories is the theory of 
an extremist. 

4 



38 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

We have now given a theoretic answer to the first 
of the two questions which met us in the outset, viz., 
What is the abstract idea of History ? by specifying 
the chief characteristics of a process of development, 
and pointing out their identity with those of an his- 
torical process. It is not pretended that this analysis and 
comparison is a complete one, and that nothing more 
could be said upon the subject ; that it js a perfectly clear 
one and could not be made more lucid. Yet no one who 
has ever made the attempt ; an attempt much more 
common now, than it was in the last century when a 
different intellectual method prevailed ; to treat a 
subject physiologically * will be hasty to complain of 
the lack of thoroughness, or especially of plainness. — 
Let any one peruse the tracts and treatises, composed 
by many able minds within the last twenty years, 
upon this general subject of progressive development, 
and observe their comparative vagueness, and he will 
be convinced that it is, intrinsically, one of the most 
difficult subjects to discuss, in the whole philosophical 
catalogue. For it implies the idea of life ; one of the 
most familiar, and at the same time most mysterious 
and baffling, of all ideas. It necessitates a physiologi- 

* The term is employed in its etymological meaning; to denote a 
method which proceeds from the doctrine, or rationale, of the intrinsic 
nature of an object. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 39 

cal or dynamic method of treating the 'subject; a 
method which compels the mind, if we may so say, 
to a subterranean labor and examination ; a method 
therefore that precludes that liveliness of mental move- 
ment, that perfect distinctness of statement, and es- 
pecially that opulence of illustration and bright spark- 
ling diction and style, which are characteristic of a 
more outward mode of investigation. To trace a law 
of life, is a far more difficult and arduous attempt for 
authorship, than to draw a beautiful picture. To 
work the mind slowly, pertinaciously, and thoroughly, 
into a deep central process of development, running 
like a magnetic current through ages of time, winding 
here, thwarted there, uprearing itself and coming forth 
in reformations and revolutions, and then retiring 
down into such depths of dormancy and slumber that 
its re-awakening seems almost an impossibility; to 
treat History in this profound and dynamic manner, is 
far more difficult, than by the aid of a versatile mind and 
a lively fancy to cause a series of brilliant pictures, of 
dazzling dissolving views, to pass with rapidity before 
the mind of a rapid reader. But which method is the 
most fruitful and fertilizing ? Which is most sugges- 
tive? Which is best adapted for the foundation of a 
course of study and investigation ? Which is capable 
of an unlimited expansion, and influence upon the 



40 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

mind of a student? Grant that, in the beginning, 
both the writer and the reader feel the need of fur- 
ther reflection and still plainer statements, so that 
there is a sort of unsatisfaction in both ; yet is not 
this very unrest, a thorn and spur to still more pro- 
found and clear intuitions ? This is one great ben- 
efit to be derived from the adoption, and reception 
into the mind, of an idea like that of development. — 
Its meaning is not so entirely upon the surface, and 
so level to the most thoughtless comprehension, that 
he who runs may read it, and exhaust its whole sig- 
nificance in a twinkling. There is ever something in 
reserve, something still to be pondered over, something 
still to be more distinctly elucidated and stated. The 
idea is itself a seed sown in the mind, having an end- 
less power of germination and fructification. A seed 
is not so striking or so sparkling an object as a dia- 
mond ; it does not make such an instantaneous im- 
pression, and it is a thousandfold more full of mystery. 
But while the gem merely flickers its cold glittering 
flashes, generation after generation, upon the single 
brow of beauty or of pride, the seed is repeating itself 
in the harvests of a continent, in the physical comfort 
and thereby the general weal of a race. Easiness of 
immediate apprehension, distinctness and vivacity of 
first statement, facility of being managed, ought all 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 41 

to be set second to depth, comprehensiveness of scope, 
richness and variety of contents, and fertility of influ- 
ence, when selecting an idea that is to constitute the 
basis of a department of knowledge, and guide the in- 
vestigations of a student through its whole long and 
wide domain. It is for this reason, and not because a 
more perspicacious and facile method could not be 
selected, that we desire in the beginning to explain 
so far as is possible, and to recommend, what has been 
termed the theory of genetic development, as the 
one which has most affinity with the real nature of 
History, and which consequently is the best organon or 
instrument for its investigation. The great change that 
has taken place, within the present century, in the 
way of conceiving and constructing History, is owing 
to the adoption, and use, of a method that was foreign 
to the mind and the intellectual tendencies of the 
eighteenth century. One only needs to compare 
history like that of Dr. Robertson with history like 
that of Dr. Arnold, or history like that of Gibbon with 
history like that of Niebuhr, to see that from some 
cause or other, a great change has come over the de- 
partment within fifty years. There is no improve- 
ment in respect to style. For who has excelled the 
clean purity of Robertson's diction, the elegant sim- 
plicity of Hume's narrative, the harmonious yet ener- 
4* 



42 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

getic pomp of Gibbon's description ? Perhaps there is, 
in general, a falling off in respect to formal properties. 
But, on the other hand, is there not a vast improve- 
ment in all the material properties of historical com- 
position ? Is not the point from which men and 
events are now contemplated, far more central and 
commanding? Is not much more made of prevailing 
ideas, general tendencies, prominent individualities, 
in short of the germs and dynamic forces of History, 
than was made during the last century ? Are not the 
lessons of this science far more impressive and solemn 
now, than they were as taught in 1750 ? Is not the de- 
partment itself exerting an influence upon other 
departments, far more modifying and transforming 
than formerly ? In short, if History may have lost 
something of that elegance and transparency which 
characterizes a product of art, has it not gained far 
more of that vitality, and power of influential impres- 
sion, which belongs to a product of nature? The 
cause of this change, in the spirit and influence of the 
department, is traceable directly to a growing disposi- 
tion to regard the history of Man. as well as that 
of Nature, as an organic process, and consequently 
as subject to a law of life and growth. Indeed it is 
noticeable, that this change has come in contempora- 
neously with a corresponding change in the method 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 43 

of contemplating Nature itself. As Natural Science 
has become more dynamic, so has History. The nat- 
uralist of the present day is not willing, like his pre- 
decessor a century ago, to regard life as the result of 
organization, and then to explain organization into a 
very curious and recondite arrangement of atomic 
matter. Mysterious as the principle itself may be, the 
modern investigator now prefers to assume a vital prin- 
ciple, as the origin and cause of all organization, and of 
all those external phenomena which were once ex- 
plained according to the mechanical view and theory of 
nature. For though he starts with a mystery which pro- 
bably he can never clear up, yet he thereby introduces 
a clearness, a consistency, a naturalness and vitality, 
into all the facts and phenomena of his science, which 
were never attained by the elder naturalists. His 
intellectual selfdenial in the beginning, is rewarded 
richly in the end. In like manner, the historian, by 
taking upon himself the severer task of regarding 
History as a process of living moral development, and 
of penetrating into its intricate organic connections, is 
in the end rewarded for his disposition to be thorough 
and profound, by finding the subject of his investiga- 
tions far more prolific and impressive than it ever was 
before. He is also rewarded by finding that this 
philosophic method, exacting as it is, in the beginning, 



44 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

upon the closest reflection and strictest discipline of 
the mind, in the end throws a clear light upon those 
deeper and darker portions of History, upon which not 
a ray of light is cast by a more superficial and easy 
mode of examination. 

Inasmuch, as the department of Church History has 
felt the influence of the dynamic method, much more 
thoroughly than other portions of the history of Man 
have as yet, and the Church Historian been the 
most successful in applying the doctrine of develop- 
ment to historical materials, we shall, in the remainder 
of this lecture, draw our illustrations from this branch 
of the general subject. 

One of the most valuable results, of the application 
of the idea of an organic process, is seen in that part 
of Ecclesiastical History which is denominated the 
History of Doctrine. This may be said to have come 
into existence since the adoption of the physiological 
method. It is indeed true that the more thoughtful 
of the ecclesiastical historians of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, such as Mosheim and the elder Planck, recog- 
nize the influence of particular doctrines, upon that 
course of external events to which they gave most 
attention ; but they usually connect the doctrine, or 
the truth, with some individual of strong or passionate 
character, from whom, more than from the truth or 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 45 

doctrine, the influence upon men and things proceeds. 
Hence in treating of the Reformation, for example, a 
disproportionate weight is attached to the personal 
religious force and wants of a single individual like 
Luther, or to the personal intellectual culture and 
aspirations of an Erasmus ; to the undervaluation of 
that great scripture doctrine of justification by faith, 
which, together with the general religious craving of 
the age, in which a Luther shared so strongly and an 
Erasmus so feebly, was the true historic ground of the 
movement, the real central historic force. It is not 
enough to trace the processes of history to individual 
influence. This pragmatic method, as it has been 
termed, must rest upon that genetic one of which 
we are speaking ; for the individual is rooted in the 
general, and all this influence of historical char- 
acters has a deeper ground in historic ideas, truths, 
and doctrines. But this was not seen and acted 
upon, until the mind of the historian was led down 
to the doctrines themselves, as the ultimate sources 
and causes. The step taken by writers like Mosheim, 
Walch, and Planck, in sacred history, and Hume, 
Robertson, and Gibbon, in secular, was one in 
advance, but was not the ultimate one. It was 
something valuable, to connect the external series of 
events and phenomena with the characters, opin- 



46 T II K PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

ions, and acts of prominent individuals, but it was 
something invaluable, because indispensable to a truly 
philosophic history, to connect events, phenomena, 
prominent individuals themselves, together with tlie 
ages and great tendencies which they represented, 
with the great standing truths of reason and revela- 
tion, and the plans and purposes of that Supreme 
Being who is the author and revealer of all. 

This step was taken, when the historian began to 
conceive and construct the facts of history, on the 
method of a genetic development. He then began, 
as this term denotes, to trace the genesis of the process ; 
to seize it in its very deepest source and lowest place 
of origin. This necessarily compelled him to go 
beyond not merely the external events themselves, but 
also their connection with leading individuals, down 
to the first springs of history in the plans and pur- 
poses of God, and, in Church History especially, to 
the truths and doctrines which God has revealed in 
his written word, as the germ and measure of all 
true development. For it is plain that, so long as the 
historian confined himself to the external occurrences, 
and their comparatively superficial relation to individ- 
ual men, he was still at a great distance from the real 
causes and forces of history ; from the absolute 
centre and origin of its processes. Notwithstanding all 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 47 

his pretensions to a philosophic treatment of the sub- 
ject, he was still at work in an upper stratum, and 
busied with secondary agencies. He could reach the 
ultimate foundation of the whole historic superstruc- 
ture, only by sinking a deeper shaft, and getting below 
events, and individual actions, to the revealed ideas 
and designs of God." For here is the origin, and this 
is the genesis. There is no source more ultimate 
than this. The historian who starts from this point, 
starts from the final centre. 

We cannot, perhaps, more appropriately conclude 
this enunciation of the abstract idea of development, 
than by directing attention, for a moment, to that 
Church Historian who has employed it more persist- 
ently, and successfully, than any other investigator, 
secular or ecclesiastical. The Church History of 
Neander,is an embodiment of the idea of development. 
It is organized throughout by this single thought. — 
And the organization is most thorough. It pervades 
each historic section ; the external history, the history 
of polity, of worship, of morality, of doctrine. Each 
of these sections exhibits an expanding process of 
evolution, either upward or downward. Each of these 
is reciprocally related to all the others, so that the 
whole, eventually, are lightly but firmly bound together 
into a greater organism. "VVe do not assert that the 



48 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

idea of the Christian Religion, as Neander conceives 
it in his own mind, is so exactly conformed to the 
New Testament representation, that the constructing 
principle of his history is entirely free from defective 
qualities. This would be saying more than can be 
of any uninspired mind. The most reverent admirer 
of this devout historian, must acknowledge that his 
construction of Church History is affected by sub- 
jective elements, that his apprehension of Christianity 
is sometimes unfavorably modified by the age and 
country in which he lived, and especially by the type 
of culture into which he was born and bred. But all 
this can be said, and should be as we believe, with- 
out denying the substantial correctness of the idea 
which impelled and guided his mind in the composi- 
tion of his work, or imputing to him any more 
material errors, than the scientific mind is always 
liable to. 

Without, therefore, entering upon any detailed 
criticism of Neander's conception of Christianity, 
which would involve a criticism of the whole work, we 
wish merely to allude to the remarkable perseverance, 
and tenacity, with which it is employed in the detec- 
tion, analysis, and synthesis, of the historic processes 
themselves. That monotony, which is complained of 
by a class of critics whose aesthetic feeling is stronger 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 49 

than their philosophic, is the monotony of organization. 
The types of organic life are necessarily few. Nature 
herself, is but slightly varied and variegated within this 
sphere. It is only in the clothing of her few archety- 
pal forms, that she exhibits the pomp, and prodigality, 
of her luxuriance. It is true that Neander's method 
is uniform. We know beforehand what the treat- 
ment of each section will be. We know that each 
subject will be handled under the same fixed 
number of topics and categories ; that each mass 
of material, like iron in a rolling mill, will be run 
through the same number and sequence of grooves. 
But this very rigor in the use of one idea, and the 
prosecution of one plan, imparts, to the product result- 
ing from it, an interest for the thinking mind, far higher 
than any merely aesthetic interest can ever be, and 
what is still more, renders it a far more instructive 
and influential work for the intellect of a student, 
than can be originated on the other method of his- 
torical composition. It is for this reason, therefore, 
that while the history of Neander has less interest for 
him who is attracted chiefly by the secular aspects of 
Christianity, it has all the more for him who knows that 
its spiritual aspects are its distinguishing and essential 
ones. He who sees in Christianity, merely or mainly, 
a religion or an institute that has exerted a most 
5 



50 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HIS TORY. 

favorable influence upon literature, science, and art; 
upon civilization, government, and the physical im- 
provement of mankind ; will be dissatisfied with this 
author's account of it. For Neander was but little, 
too little, interested in these civilizing, and intellectual, 
influences. But he who sees in Christianity, first of 
all and last of all, a moral and spiritual power, des- 
tined by its Divine Author to regenerate the inmost 
heart of humanity, and hence intended to affect pri- 
marily the eternal interests of mankind, will find this 
stern aesthetic indifference, and naked but lofty spirit- 
ualism, of the Historian, all the more imposing and 
impressive. For he passes through the pomps and 
splendors that thicken and trail along the march of 
Christianity, as St. Paul did through the temples and 
sculptures of Athens, or the porticos and triumphal 
arches of Rome ; with an eye too intently fixed upon 
more unutterable realities and more awful splendors, 
to be attracted, much less dazzled, by things seen and 
temporal. To one who seeks to know Christianity in 
its own living moral nature, with few or none of its 
secular adjuncts, the close and powerful method of 
Neander is exceedingly welcome, and exceedingly 
suggestive and fertile. And while the student of 
Church History is never to be a servile recipient of 
all the views of any mind, however learned or con- 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 51 

templative, we think it may safely be said, that, from 
the existing literature in this department, no single 
work can be selected, which so well deserves as 
does this, to be made both a resort, and a point of 
departure, for his mind. While examining and pon- 
dering its contents, the inquirer will find himself, all 
along, in the very heart of Christianity, because the 
history is constructed out of the very idea of Chris- 
tianity itself; that is, in its spirit and by its light. 



LECTURE II. 

THE NATURE, AND DEFINITION, OF SECULAR HISTORY. 

In the previous lecture, we have confined ourselves 
to an analysis of the abstract idea of development, in 
order to reach the abstract nature of History. As a 
consequence, we have brought into view only the uni- 
versal characteristics of an expanding process, paying 
no regard to those particular qualities, which are dis- 
covered as soon as we begin to examine the several 
species of history that fall under the generic concep- 
tion. For here, as everywhere, the concrete applica- 
tion of a metaphysical idea, is of equal importance 
with its analytic enunciation. An a priori statement 
requires to be completed by an a posteriori verification, 
in order to obtain the highest scientific value and cur- 
rency* The principal reason why the department of 

* An a priori theory is worthless whenever the thought, in the mind, 
is not found to correspond with the thing, in nature. In this instance 
the theory is no S-ecopia, no seeing through and seeing around, but re- 
mains what it was in the start, an hypothesis or conjecture. For the 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 53 

metaphysics is in such ill repute with the popular 
mind, on the ground of both real and imaginary defi- 
ciences, lies in the fact that it has not in all instances 
been thoroughly treated. The philosopher has been too 
content with conceptions in their abstract and univer- 
sal forms. He has been too averse to take the second 
step, and do the last work ; which is, after the idea 
has been sufficiently enucleated by logical analysis, 
to bring it forth from this speculative shape, and 
exhibit it as a concrete and working truth, or, in the 
phrase of Bacon, " to temper the rigor of the abstrac- 
tion by the softening explanation." This is in reality 
more difficult to accomplish, than to merely follow the 
laws of logical thinking, without any regard to the 
refractions, and reflections, and modifications, of actual 
processes. To follow a pure logical sequence, is no 
greater task for a logical mind, than it is for a vigor- 
Newtonian theory of gravitation, in the moment of its first conception 
in the mind of the thinker, was purely hypothetical, and, had not the 
whole subsequent course of astronomical science been a verification of 
it, would have been an hypothesis still, only an exploded one. The 
difference between the Alchemist's theory of occult qualities, and that 
of a true natural philosophy, does not lie in the employment of a dif- 
ferent mode of formation in one instance, from that used in the other, 
but in the fact that the first does not stand the tests of observation and 
application, while the last docs. Both are formed on the a priori method, 
but the a posteriori verification destroys in one case, and confirms in the 
other. _„ 



54 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

ous body to walk up a flight of stairs. The steps 
themselves, in both instances, perform most of the labor. 
The walker needs only to lift up his limbs and put them 
down, to be lifted upward, fifty or a hundred feet, into 
space, and the logician needs merely to follow the con- 
nections of an idea, to be carried through a very wide 
and long range of speculation. Hence the facility with 
which a mere logician analyzes ideas into their consti- 
tuent elements, and constructs systems out of them. It 
is more difficult, as we have remarked, to be entirely 
thorough, and follow an idea out into the sphere of 
historical reality, and thus know it in the concrete. 
Had this been done more often, by the metaphysical 
philosopher, he would have subjected truth to a more 
exhaustive examination, that would have precluded 
those misconceptions, which so often come in sub- 
sequently to an accurate a priori analysis and viti- 
ate it. 

The doctrine of development, in particular, has 
oftentimes undergone deterioration, and lost scientific 
properties, by being contemplated too long and exclu- 
sively in its abstract form. Neglecting to test and 
clarify it by observation, some theorists in Natural 
Science, come to employ the idea in a sense that is 
contrary to the strict results of logical analysis itself, 
as well as contradicted by the whole course of nature. 



T II B P II I L O S O P II Y OF II I S T O R Y . i )'■ ) 

Fastening their gaze upon the continuity of the pro- 
cess, they lose sight of its origin, and slide uncon- 
sciously into the notion of an eternal potentiality. — 
This necessitates the second absurd notion, of poten- 
tiality within potentiality, or evolution of heteroge- 
neous germs out of homogeneous ones. The process 
has now lost its primitive logical simplicity, and 
unity, and becomes a complex and fanciful scheme of 
emanations. The germ is no longer a transparent 
and pure, creation from nothing, but an obscure and 
mixed evolution from antecedent germs, and these, 
again, from their antecedents, and so backward end- 
lessly, with ever increasing vagueness and mixture, 
into the abyss of chaotic being. Now setting aside 
the valid objections that spring out of Ethics and 
Religion,* it is plain that an actual questioning of 

* That the ancient Oriental systems of Emanation, and their modern 
counterparts the pantheistic systems, are destructive of the first principles 
and distinctions of Ethics and Religion, is notorious. But that these 
same schemes are ruinous to true Science, is not so often considered. — 
Let any one, however, examine the stupendous system of Gnosticism, 
that sprung up in the 2d and 3d centuries, and he will be convinced, that 
such a conglomerate is incompatible with logical coherence and scientific 
6elf-consistence. Starting from a false fundamental principle, and sub- 
stituting emanation for creation, every new step must be an attempt at 
adjustment. This introduces still more troublesome and unmanageable 
matter, which, again, calls for new attempts at arrangement, until an 



5fi THE PHILOSOPHV OF HISTORY. 

Nature, for the facts in the ease, would have preserved 
these theorists from this corruption of the true con- 
ception of a development, and kept them upon the 
truly scientific position. Nature never exhibits the evo- 
lution of one specific germ from another, and the simple 
observation, and remembrance, of this matter of fact, 
would have led the wandering theorist to retrace his 
steps. A verification of the abstract conception itself, by 
an actual reference to the organic processes actually 
going on in nature before his eyes, would have 
reminded him of the scientific truth, he was beginning 
to forget, that mere development cannot account for 
the origin of any new thing ; that a germ can only 
protrude its own latency, and cannot inlay a foreign 
one. The very significant matter of fact, that one 
species never expands into another,* would have 
reminded him of the truth, which is also reached by 
the " high priori road " of rigorous analysis, that 
though a process of development can be accounted for 

amorphous mass of speculation is aggregated, that is totally destitute of 
the homogeneity, concinnity, clearness, and nicety, of Science. 

* The baffled anxiety with which a theorist, like the author of" The 
Vestiges of Creation," ransacks the history of Natural Science, to dis- 
cover a well authenticated instance in which a higher species is developed 
from a lower, is instructive, as evincing his sense of the inestimable 
value of such a fact, for his purposes, if such an one could be found. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 57 

out of the latent potentiality at its base, this latter 
can be accounted for, only by recurring to the creative 
power of God. The careful recognition of the fact, 
that in rerum natura the expansion of a vegetable seed, 
even if carried on through all the aeons upon aeons 
of the Gnostic scheme, or the cycles upon cycles of 
the geological system, never transmutes it into the 
egg of animal life, would recall the attention of the 
speculatist to the self-evident proposition, that noth- 
ing can come forth, that has never been put in. The 
seen, and acknowledged, failure to discover any 
instance in which the passage from the animal to the 
rational soul, from the brute to the man, has been 
effected by the pure development of the former, would 
correct the vitiating metaphysics of the theorizer, and 
restore it to the strictly scientific and necessary state- 
ment, that a latency of an animal kind, cannot by 
mere expansion be converted into one entirely hetero- 
geneous, so as to become the basis of a moral and 
spiritual, as distinguished from an animal, history. 

This same vitiation of true metaphysics, and mis- 
apprehension of an abstract conception, is seen also 
within the sphere of mind, and of human history. — 
Theorizers here, forgetting the fact of self-will, con- 
found the idea of development, with that of improve- 
ment. There is nothing in the logical conception oi 



58 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

an evolving process, that warrants their assertion, that 
all movement in the history of a moral agent must, of 
necessity, be normal and upward. All that is required 
by the a priori definition is, that the process shall be an 
expanding one, but of what species, or from what 
basis, is still undetermined. Forgetting the fact of 
free will, and the possibility of defection from law 
attached to it by the Creator, they deal with man, as 
they do with the crystal or the flower, and suppose 
that to say he is passing through a process of devel- 
opment, necessarily implies that he is advancing, like 
" the splendor of the grass and the glory of the flower," 
from one degree of excellence to another.* 

* " Evil," says Emerson, (Essay on Swedenborg), "is good in the 
making. That pure malignity can exist, is the extreme proposition of 
unbelief. It is not to be entertained by a rational agent ; it is atheism ; 
it is the last profanation. The divine effort is never relaxed ; the car- 
rion in the sun, will convert itself to grass and flowers ; and the man, 
though in brothels, or jails, or on gibbets, is on the way to all that is 
good and true." Extremes meet. The denial of the doctrine of human 
apostasy, on the ground that it is dishonorable to man, conducts very 
naturally to the denial of man's distinguishing and highest endowment, 
viz : his free will, and results in degrading human nature to the level of 
" carrion," and " flowers." It is sometimes asked, why God permitted 
sin ? Perhaps it was to show, that man is a will, and has a will. Cer- 
tain it is, that wherever the fact of the free and guilty fall of man is 
acknowledged, materializing views of man's nature do not prevail. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 59 

Here, again, as in the instance of the natural philoso- 
pher, a single observation of a fact, staring every 
inquirer in the face, of an abuse of freedom, and a 
consequent false unfolding in human nature, would 
have re-impressed upon these minds the lesson which 
a rigorous analysis also teaches, viz : that an organic 
process may be downwards, as well as upwards ; one 
of decline and slow death, as well as of rise and 
bloom. The stubborn fact, of an illegitimate devel- 
opment going on in the very heart of humanity, and 
covering the whole period of human history, compels 
the theorizer to notice an aspect of the doctrine, he 
had lost sight of amidst the abstraction of Science, 
which is concerned with what ought to be, more than 
what may be, and actually is. The application of the 
metaphysical conception of development, to what he 
finds to be a stern matter of fact, preserves its scientific 
purity, and precision, by preventing him from surrepti- 
tiously throwing out its universality, and impartiality, 
whereby it is capable of an application to any process, 
legitimate or illegitimate, so it be an organic sequence, 
and surreptitiously narrowing it down to a particular 
species of process, viz : a normal one. For there is no 
more reason for regarding evolution as synonymous 
with improvement alone, than with degeneracy alone. 
Scientific universals are wide, and impartial. No 



60 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

particular truth is told, or intended to be, when it is 
asserted that there is a process of development going 
on in the world. This is granted upon all sides. On 
coming within the sphere of free agency, it is neces- 
sary, in order to any definite and valuable statement, 
to determine, by actual observation, w hat it is that is 
being expanded ; whether a primitive potentiality 
originated by the Creator, or a secondary one origi- 
nated by the creature, to either of which, the abstract 
conception of expansion is alike applicable. 

Hence, on coming down into the sphere of the con- 
crete, we are obliged to notice the varieties of devel- 
opment. In endeavoring to apply the idea, whose 
nature we have analyzed, to the actual career of man 
on the globe, we must take into account the pecu- 
liarity of this career. In specifying this, we exhibit 
the distinctive nature of Secular History, and give its 
definition. 

The ordinary, and common, history of mankind, as 
the observer in every age sees it going on before his 
eyes, differs from all other histories, of which he knows 
anything, by being contrary to the primary law of 
creation. All other existences, so far as he knows, are 
conformed to the law of their being, and their devel- 
opment is, consequently, legitimate and normal. 
Throughout all material nature, there is no possibility 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 61 

of the contrary, and, consequently, there is an inevi- 
table obedience to the creative idea, and an unvary- 
ing expansion of the original germ. The few mon- 
sters, lusus natures as we call them, are very few, and 
do not affect the genus, or species, to which they 
belong. A mal-formed crystal is an isolated thing, 
and its formation has no effect upon the law and pro- 
cess, of crystallization. A body with two heads is 
entirely anomalous, and uncommon, and does not, in 
the least, modify the operation of the general law of 
production. Material nature proceeds undeviatingly, 
because, within this sphere, there is no possibility of 
self-will. Development here, is both ideal and uni- 
form. Hence, the moralist and theologian point to 
the perfect unfolding of the natural world, as an 
example, to be imitated by the voluntary spirit of 
man. The highest authority has set the lilies of the 
field before us, for our deliberate imitation ; and the 
poet, in his distich, has briefly repeated the same truth : 
" Seekest thou the highest, and the greatest ? the 
plants can teach it to thee. What they are involun- 
tarily, that be thou voluntarily." * 

And if we pass from nature into the realm of spirit- 
ual existence, we find that, with the exception of 

* Schiller. Das Hochste. 

6 



62 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

man, and a portion of the angelic hosts, all voluntary 
beings are in allegiance to law, and their develop- 
ment is legitimate, and normal. For that catastrophe 
and fall in heaven, was scarcely a speck upon the infi- 
nite expanse of eternity. The idea of race does not 
apply to the angel, as it does to the man. We speak 
of the angelic hos. , but never of the angelic race. 
Hence the apostasy of the Son of the Morning and 
his followers, like the mal-formation of a crystal in 
the material world, was an isolated occurrence, whose 
effects did not extend beyond itself. Each angelic 
will fell for, and by, itself. Hence the general allegi- 
ance of the hierarchies continued, and continues,* so 
that we may say, notwithstanding this instance of 
deviation from the Divine law, that in the heavenly 
world, as in the natural, the development and the his- 
tory are legitimate, and normal. 

Man then stands alone ; the only unloyal race in the 
universe ; the only species of being which, as a unity, 
and a whole, has thrown itself out of the line of its 
true destination, and is running a false career. 

* * * far the greater part have kept, I see, 

Their station ; heaven yet populous, retains 
Number sufficient to possess her realms, 
Though wide, and this high temple to frequent 
With ministeries due, and solemn rites. 

Paradise Lost, vii. 145-149 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 63 

With the possibility, and necessary conditions of 
such a catastrophe, we have in this discussion no 
concern. It is sufficient, for the purposes of the phi- 
losophy of Secular History, to postulate its occurrence 
through the abuse of human freedom, by the permis- 
sive will, and decree, of God. Had, then, the devel- 
opment of man proceeded from the primary germ, 
and original inlay, it would have been ideal, and per- 
fect. All that some theorists now say respecting the 
actual history of man, w r ould then have been exact, y 
descriptive of that normal process. Human nature 
would then have unfolded in all the beauty, and per- 
fect conformity to the creative idea, which we have 
seen to be characteristic of the crystal, or the flower. 
The spontaneous, and the natural, in human history, 
would then have been the ideal, and the perfect. 

But we know, not by an a priori method but as 
matter of fact, that the development of humanity did 
not proceed from this first, and proper, point of de- 
parture. The creative idea, by the Creator's permis- 
sion, was not realized by the free agent. The law of 
man's creation was not obeyed. The original, and 
true, historic germ was crowded out, by a second 
false one. The first potential basis of human history, 
which provided for a purer progress, and a grander 
evolution, than man now can conceive of, was dis- 



64 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

placed by a second basis, which likewise provided for 
a false development, and an awful history, :f not mper- 
naturally hindered, all along through the same endless 
duration. 

The origination of moral evil by the self-will of 
man, consequently, brings to view another aspect of 
the idea of development, and a different application 
of the doctrine of genetic evolution. This stubborn 
fact compels the speculating mind to acknowledge, 
what it is prone to lose sight of, viz: that so far as 
the abstract definition is concerned, development may 
be synonymous with corruption, and decline, as well 
as with improvement ; that the organic sequences of 
history may be those of decay, and death, as well as 
those of bloom, and life. For it displays-, for his exam- 
ination, another sort of germ, besides that one cre- 
ated by the Creator, and which He pronounced "good." 
It shows him a very different potentialty, from that 
original moral perfection with which humanity was 
once endowed. It enables him to understand some- 
thing of the meaning of free-will, and, yet more, some- 
thing of the mystery of self-will. For that misappre- 
hension of the abstract idea of development, whereby 
it is contracted down from its wide universality of 
meaning, and applicability to all organic processes 
whatsoever, and limited to the single part cular pro- 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 65 

cess of improvement, arises from overlooking the 
functions and operations of free agency, which play 
such a part in the history of Man, and introduce such 
changes and varieties into it. The philosopher, at 
this point, as at many others, needs the instruction 
of the theologian. He needs to be reminded by 
his scientific co-laborer, that the moral power of self- 
determination causes alterations, and catastrophes, 
within the moral world, such as never appear in the 
world of material nature, and hence that when the 
theorist comes into this sphere, he must not be sur- 
prised if he finds archetypes departed from, and glo- 
rious ideals unrealized. Theology reminds philoso- 
phy of the fact, that although the natural and secular 
man is mentally rational, he is not morally so ; that 
though the eternal truths of right, have been inlaid in 
his reason, by the act of his Creator, they have been 
expelled from his will, by an act of his own. The 
theorist, contemplating man's mental constitution, 
finds him to be possessed of all the truths of reason. 
These truths are necessary, and, in their own nature, 
entitled to an universal dominion. Hence he hastily 
concludes, that they must, of themselves, prevail in 
the history of any being, in whose very mental struc- 
ture they are so thoroughly inwoven. The specu- 
lative maxim, " truth is mighty, and must prevail," 

6* 



66 T H E PHILOSO P II Y OF HISTORY. 

carries him to the practical conclusion, "a rational 
being must inevitably act out his rationality, and 
be rational in all respects." But the theorist for- 
gets, that the realization of a truth, in life and con- 
duct, can go forth only from the active, and emotive, 
side of man. The heart and will, are the vitality of the 
human soul, and, hence, the proper seat of growth and 
evolution within it.* We have already, by a rigorous 
definition, evinced, that a process of development, is an 
organic, and consequently a thoroughly vital, one. Of 
whichever species it may be ; be it growth in perfec- 
tion, or growth in corruption, be it a living life, or a 
living death ; as a connected and organic process, it 
must go on in the faculties of feeling and will, or 
not at all. Development, be it true or false, is the 
result of an active principle. If, therefore, the truths 
of reason and righteousness are not wrought into this 
part of the man, it matters not how thoroughly they 
may have been elaborated, by the Creator's act, into 

* It is a maxim of the lynx-eyed Aristotle, that " mere intellect 
moves nothing ; " Ziavota 5' avrrj ovSeu Kivei . Ethics, vi. 5. 

That radical movement and transformation must proceed from the prac- 
tical, in distinction from the theoretic, side of human nature, is the teach- 
ing of this whole paragraph, as well as of others, in this system of 
ethics. The theological doctrine, that no real moral change can be 
brought about in humanity, but by the renewal of the mil, will suggest it- 
self to the reader in this connection. 



T UK PHILOSOPHY O F II I S T R Y . 67 

the stationary intellectual part of him. For there can 
be no flexile expansion of a truth of reason or reve- 
lation, unless it has been assimilated, and absorbed, 
into the moral and voluntary nature of man. Re- 
maining in its rigid intellectual form, in the pure the- 
oretic reason of man, a doctrine of natural, or of 
revealed, religion, has no more power of pliantly un- 
folding into feeling and conduct, than a stone has of 
turning into vegetable matter, merely because it has 
been caught, and held, in the fork of a rapidly grow- 
ing tree. The error of the theorist, who argues from 
the ideal to the real, and affirms the necessary normal 
development of human nature, merely because it con- 
tains within itself the rule and law by which it ought 
to unfold; this error, of regarding development as the 
synonyme of improvement, arises from overlooking 
the difference between the legislative and the execu- 
tive, the constitutive and the voluntary, the mental 
and the moral. A very considerable degree of moral 
light may exist, without the least degree of moral life. 
The rise of a respectable system of natural theology 
in pagan Greece and Rome, is no more a proof of a 
normal, or even an improving, evolution of human 
nature in that age and clime, than the clearest con- 
victions of reason, and the most poignant reproaches 
of conscience, in an individual, are proofs that his in- 



68 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

ward moral life is heavenly and heaven-ward. Indeed, 
it is only a very loose, and inadequate, apprehension of 
the idea of development, that can find in that wholly 
speculative movement of the ancient philosophic mind, 
and which, moreover, even in this form, was con- 
fined to a very few of the more thoughtful sages, 
and never exerted any influence upon the individual 
and social life of the Greek and Roman populations ; 
it is, we say, a very meagre and narrow conception 
of a very pregnant and fertile idea, that can find, in 
such a restricted phenomenon, the characteristics of a 
great diffusive organic process, which moulds human 
society internally, and from the centre. Can any can- 
did mind say, that that " moral philosophy," which, 
as Bacon says, " was the heathen divinity," sustained 
the same inward relation to heathendom, that Chris- 
tianity does to Christendom ; that the system of Soc- 
rates was the principle of moral life for any portion 
of antiquity, as the system of Christ has been for the 
church in all ages ? On the contrary, was not the 
truth, as St. Paul affirms, held down in unrighteous- 
ness, and was not the actual spontaneous develop- 
ment of the old world, as contrary to the doctrines of 
natural, as of revealed, religion ? 

And, so far as the individual examples of pagan 
virtue are concerned, we are willing to leave the de- 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 69 

cision of the question, to themselves, whether the nat- 
ural religion, which they apprehended in their reason 
and conscience, had so passed into their affections and 
will, and had such a vital control over their heart and 
character, as to constitute a normal development of 
human nature in their case. Read Plato, and find as 
full a confession, prompted by a personal conscious- 
ness, of the corruption and degeneracy of human 
nature, as ever came from uninstructed lips. Ask the 
wisest of heathen, if the principles of reason and 
righteousness, which lay in such clear outline before 
his mind's eye, constituted the life of his soul ; and 
hear the answer, that however it may have been with 
him in a pre-existence of which he dreamed, and 
however it might be with him in a future world of 
which he knew nothing with certainty, the existing in- 
ward life, the present character, and the actual on-going 
development, was certainly contrary to the Beautiful, 
the True, and the Good. 

The result, then, of the investigation in this lec- 
ture, is the further distinction of the idea of develop- 
ment from that of improvement, and the definition 
of Secular History as an abnormal but organic pro- 
cess. We had previously distinguished it from crea- 
tion, and, now, this second limitation brings us round 
to an exhaustive definition of an idea which is probably 



70 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

more potent, than any other, in forming and fixing 
the intellectual methods of the present generation of 
educated men. The history of the word is instruc- 
tive. The loose, and unscientific, use of this single 
term, has done as much as any other single cause, to 
introduce error into current theories of nature, of 
man, and of human history. The remedy is not to 
be found in the rejection of either the conception or 
the term, but in a rigorous and scientific treatment of 
the idea itself, by which it is made to yield up its true 
and exact meaning ; whereby it shall be fitted to apply 
equally to Heavenly and to Profane History, to pare 
and to corrupt evolutions, to organic processes of bloom 
and beauty and perfection, and to organic processes 
of decline, decay, and ruin. The downward tenden- 
cies of human nature, which constitute the substance 
of Secular, as distinguished from Saored, History ; the 
acknowledged deterioration of languages, literatures, 
religions, arts, sciences, and civilizations; the slow 
and sure decay of national vigor, and return to barbar- 
ism ; the unvarying decline, from public virtue to pub- 
lic voluptuousness ; in short, the entire history of man, 
so far as he is outside of supernatural influences, and 
unaffected by the intervention of his original Creator, 
though it is a self-determined and responsible process, 
is yet, in every part and particle, as organically con- 



THE PHILOSOPHY OP HISTORY. 71 

nected, and as strict an evolution, as is that other up- 
ward tendency, started in the Christian Church, and 
ended in the eternal state, by which this same hu- 
manity is being restored to the heights whence it 
fell. 

But while the course of development in Secular or 
Profane History, presupposes a potential basis from 
which it proceeds, the all-important fact must be 
noticed, and remembered, that this is a secondary 
basis, and not a primary one, and that the originating 
author is the finite, and not the infinite, will. Under 
and within the permissive decree of God, sin is mail's 
creation ; he makes it out of nothing. For the origin 
of moral evil cannot be accounted for, by the expan- 
sion of something already in existence, any more than 
the origin of matter can be. Original righteousness, 
unfolded never so long, and intensely, will never be 
transmuted into original sin. The passage, from one 
to the other, must be by an absolutely originant act of 
self-will, which act, subject only to the limitation and 
condition, above-mentioned, of the permission of the 
Supreme Being, is strictly creative from nothing. 
The origin of sin, is the origination of a new historic 
germ, and not the unfolding, or modification, of an old 
one, and hence the necessity of a creating, in distinc- 
tion from a developing, energy; such as is denoted by 



72 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

the possibilitas peccandi attributed by the theologian 
to the will of the unfallen Adam. Supposing, then, 
the beginning of moral evil to be carefully referred to 
the abuse of human freedom, and keeping the process 
of its evolution within the same sphere of self-will in 
which it took its first start, we may then say, that it 
undergoes a development, as truly as any thing else 
that belongs to the history of man. If any one doubts 
whether this term, so often applied only in a good 
sense, as to be for the popular mind the synonyme of 
normal progress, is properly applicable to a process 
like that of human sinfulness, he needs only to try this 
process by the tests that are discriminated in the meta- 
physical analysis of the conception. He will find that 
the corruption of humanity has been as organic a 
sequence, from an original centre, as is to be found 
either in the realm of Nature, or of Spirit; that it 
exhibits all the characteristics of an evolution ; the 
necessary and natural connection of elements and prop- 
erties, their action and reaction, the sameness of gen- 
eric principle in all the individual varieties, and the 
unceasing motion of a constant expansion. 

The same rigorous application of the doctrine of 
development, moreover, compels us to the further po- 
sition, that the reversal of this illegitimate, and false, 
process which is going on in humanity, also necessi- 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 73 

tates a creative power. For no process of mere, and 
strict, evolution can go behind itself, and alter the 
base from which it proceeds. Radical changes can- 
not be produced in this manner. There must be an 
originant energy, in order to these. The passage from 
holiness to sin, we have already noticed, cannot be 
accounted for by the doctrine of development, and 
neither can the passage from sin to holiness be ex- 
plained by the theory of education. The expulsion 
of a false germ, and the re-introduction of the true one, 
must, therefore, be accomplished by an agency that 
is creative, in distinction from one that is merely ex- 
pansive. An organic process is, by its very nature 
and definition, self-perpetuating, until an agency, spe- 
cifically different from its own, interferes. A germ 
of one kind cannot originate a germ of a different one, 
and consequently there is no natural and germhiant 
passage, from an illegitimate to a legitimate poten- 
tiality in human history, any more than there is from 
a vegetable to an animal species. The passage, if 
there be one, must be supernatural; i. e. the work of 
a creative, in distinction from an educing, agency, and 
by an instantaneous act, in distinction from a gradual 
process. 

Secular history is therefore separated from Sacred, 
by a chasm over which it cannot pass, except by the 

7 



74 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

intervention of the Creator.* The abuse of human 
freedom, allows of no self-remedy. The Christian 
Religion, and the new historic process resting upon 
it, cannot, from the very nature of the case, and the 

* The query may arise in this connection, whether this creativo 
energy may not be in the fallen finite will itself, and thus there be no 
absolute necessity of the intervention of the infinite Spirit, and employ- 
ment of special Divine efficiency. If the human will was possessed, 
before its defection from Law, of a power to create moral evil, why is it 
not possessed, since its fall, of a power to create moral good 1 The 
objections to this are the following. (1) The affirmation of such a 
power rests, solely, upon an a priori foundation. There is no a posteriori 
test, and verification, that corroborates it. Fallen man is not conscious 
of such an originant energy to good, though he is at times conscious of 
its lack ; and that he never exerted it, is a well-established fact. T^his 
power then to originate, in distinction from develop and cultivate, 
holiness, if attributed to the sinful will at all, must be attributed upon 
other grounds than psychological and practical ones. But metaphysics 
unsupported by psychology, we have seen, must be conjectural merely, 
and consequently of a spurious order. An abstract theory, which is 
destitute of its concrete correspondent in the world of actual experi- 
ence, like the Alchemists' hypothesis of occult qualities, is destitute of 
scientific value. Science demands a matching of the one half, with its 
other half; of the a priori, with the a jiosteriori. If such be the real 
i elation of these two intellectual methods to each other, it follows that 
a position, like the one in question, which can get its support from only 
one of them, and this, the least practical of the two, should be rejected. 
(2) But in the second place, even if the position in question be held as 
a pure abstraction, by a dead lift of the intellect, and without any 
experimental corroboration, it then follows from it, that the finite will 



THE PHILOSOPHY OP HISTORY. 75 

very terms of the statement, be an evolution of the 
apostate man. To affirm this, would be to confound 
development with creation. A clear and distinct con- 
ception, consequently, of the nature of Secular His- 
tory, guides the mind inevitably to the doctrine, and 
fact, of Revelation, if a radical change is to be intro- 

can be the absolute, and sole, author of holiness, as it is of sin, and that, 
consequently, it can establish for itself an absolute meritoriousness 
before God, as it can and has an absolute guiltiness. It confessedly has 
the power of creating moral evil out of nothing, without the influence 
and co-operation of the Divine Spirit, so that its demerit is absolute, 
and its damnation eternal, in case it uses this power; and if it is capable 
of originating moral good, in the same unassisted manner, then a cor- 
respondent absoluteness of merit would be established upon this side. 
But no finite will, not even that of the unfallen angels, can take the 
total merit of holiness to itself, as the fallen will must take the total 
demerit of sinfulness. It is only on the side of moral evil, that the will 
of the creature can act without influence and assistance from the Creator, 
because it is only on this side, that it can act in opposition to Him. — 
While, therefore, man by the permission of the Supreme, and not with- 
out it, can abuse his free agency, and establish a self-derived, and there- 
fore absolute, criminality, he can never, by the use of free agency, 
establish a self-derived, and therefore absolute, worthiness. If then, the 
very relationship of all moral good to the Holy Spirit, is that of depen- 
dence, to such a degree that the doctrine of its absolute origination, 01 
creation from nothing, is inapplicable even to the unfallen finite spirit, 
much more must this doctrine be excluded, in the instance of the 
apostate will. The theory of a strictly originant energy in the soul of 
man, can, consequently, apply only to moral evil. 



76 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

duced. No new order of history can possibly begin, 
if the existing movement and expansion are simply 
left to themselves. An absolutely originant and cre- 
ative power must be called in, to reverse the process, 
and give it an upward instead of a downward, 
direction. 



LECTURE III. 

THE NATURE, AND DEFINITION, OF CHURCH HISTORY. 

In explaining and applying the idea of development, 
we have arrived at the nature of History in the 
abstract, and of that specific concrete form which is 
denominated Profane, or Secular. We have now to 
make a third application of the idea to the history of 
Christianity. 

Church History we define to be, the restoring of 
the true development of the human spirit, by the 
supernatural agency of its Creator. The doctrine of 
evolution is now to be applied to that gradual process 
of recovery from the apostasy of his will, which 
regenerated man is passing through, here on earth, as 
a member of the spiritual kingdom of Christ. We 
shall find this to be a series, and sequence, as organic 
as any that have passed before our review, or that we 
can conceive of. The founder of Christianity Him- 
self, so describes it, when He says that " The kingdom 
of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a 
man took, and sowed in his field ; which indeed is the 
least of all seeds: but when it is grown it is the 
V 



78 THE PHILOSOPHY "OF HISTORY. 

greatest among herbs, and becoraeth a tree, so that 
the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches 
thereof ;" when He says, again, that "the kingdom of 
heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and 
hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was 
leavened." * In these parables, two of the most tho- 
rough and inward processes in nature, viz : those of 
germination and fermentation, are chosen by our Lord 
to indicate the real nature of his religion. And no 
one can study the illustrations, which He so frequently 
employs, in order to give a clear conception of his 
religion as it works in the individual soul, and in the 
world at large, without being convinced that it is, in 
its own sphere and kind, as much of the nature of a 
living principle, as the breath of life in the nostrils. — 
For these illustrations are almost entirely drawn from 
the world of animated nature, and thereby evince that 
the Author of nature and of grace knows, that the 
vitality of the one best symbolizes and explains the 
vitality of the other. 

But if it was of the first importance, in the previous 
lectures, to direct attention to the fact, that the power 
which originates the basis of any living process is a 
creative one, it is certainly so in the present instance. 
This free, and fresh, unfolding of the Christian life, in 

* Matthew xin. 31—33. 



T II M PHILOSOPHY OP HISTORY. 79 

the midst of the declining processes of Secular History, 
as was indicated in the close of the last lecture, can- 
not be accounted for, by any germs or forces lying 
undeveloped in the heart of the secular man. Mere 
expansion, forever and forevermore, would only display 
a more thoroughly intense, and concentrated, corrup- 
tion of human nature. We are, consequently, once 
more driven to the Supernatural and Divine, if any 
radical change in humanity, and any new species of 
history, is to be introduced. As Secular History is 
the unfolding of the fallen nature of man, left to its 
own spontaneity, so Sacred History is the develop- 
ment of his regenerated nature, under the continued 
influence of the power that first, and instantaneously, 
effected the change. The»first question, consequently, 
that is to be answered here, relates to this power itself. 
What, then, is that supernatural Power, which begins, 
carries forward, and perfects, that new process of 
development in human nature, which constitutes the 
sum and substance of Church History ? In answering 
this question, we necessarily describe, by implication, 
the nature of this species, and obtain a clue to the 
whole process itself. 

Speaking generally, the power which begins, per- 
petuates, and completes, the restoration of the true 
unfolding of humanity, is Divine Revelation. The 



80 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 



term is taken in its most comprehensive moaning, to 
denote the entire special communication which God 
has made to man. In this generic form, it subdivides 
into two main branches ; (1) The revelation of Truth : 
(2) The dispensation of the Spirit. 

From the fall in Eden, down to the death of the 
last of the Apostles, God, through the medium of 
inspiration, at sundry times and in divers manners, 
has imparted to the mind of man a body of knowledge, 
the purpose of which is to enlighten his darkened 
understanding respecting his origin, fall, actual char- 
acter, religious necessities and the divine method of 
meeting them. This revealed truth has been pre- 
served by special Providence, and is now, an out- 
ward, fixed, written revelation. 

Again, parallel with this species of Divine commu- 
nication, another has been made, viz : a dispensation 
of direct spiritual influence. The purpose of this 
second form of the Divine manifestation, is to renew 
and sanctify the human soul. The function of the 
first, is to enlighten, as that of the second, is to enliven. 
These two forms of God's supernatural self-revelation 
are co-ordinate, and necessary to each other's success; 
and hence the dispensation of spiritual influence has 
accompanied that of truth, in all ages of the Church 
from the very beginning. For although the degree 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 81 

and e entof this influence, was greatly augmented 
after the ascension of Christ, yet it would be as incor- 
rect to affirm that the kind, the fact itself of direct 
divine efficiency upon the human soul, did not exist 
in the Patriarchal and Jewish churches, as it would to 
assert that there was no revelation of truth from God, 
previous to the New Testament economy, because the 
disclosures of this latter were so much fuller than 
those of its antecedent. 

Revelation, then, in this generic sense, is a unity 
and a continuity. So far as it is a communication 
of Truth, it began with the promise in Eden, and 
ended with the glowing invitation of the beloved 
disciple of the Incarnate Word, who was also the 
Jehovah of the Patriarchs and Prophets, addressed to 
all men without distinction, to take the water of life 
freely. So far as it is a communication of the Spirit, 
it commenced with the regeneration of the fallen pair, 
and has continued, through all ages, to be the efficient 
agency in applying the written revelation. Unlike 
the communication of the Word, that of the Spirit 
must continue to the end of the world ; and yet the 
permanent co-ordination, and mutual necessity, of 
each, will be seen in the fact, that the finished revela- 
tion of Truth, the concluded canon of Scripture, will 
be employed to the end of time, by the Holy Ghost, 



82 THE PHILOSOPHY OP HISTORY. 

as his own, and only, instrument of human renova- 
tion. 

We have, then, in this total, generic, Revelation 
from God, the originant power in Church History. — 
The foundation of Secular History, is the human 
mind and human power, under the merely ordinary, 
maintaining, agency of Divine Providence; that of 
Sacred History, is the Divine mind and Divine power, 
exerting themselves with an extraordinary and creative 
energy. Supernatural communication from the Deity, 
is the great objective force in this species of human 
history; the foundation and principle of the restored 
normal development of humanity. This revelation of 
Himself on the part of God, entering into the midst 
and mass of mankind, selects out a portion by a 
sovereign act,* regenerates, and moulds, it into a body 
by Itself, separate from the world though existing in 
it. This body is therefore as truly organized, and 

* The fall of man is generic, and hence all men are fallen ; the 
redemption of man is individual, and electing, and consequently only a 
portion are saved. A catastrophe, like spiritual apostasy, occurring at 
a point in human history when humanity was a unit, and a unity, affects 
the whole, indiscriminately, and without exception; but when man has 
passed out of this form of existence, into that of a series, and succession, 
of individuals, it is plain that the principle of individualism must 
govern his restoration, and that redemption, consequently, cannot be 
generic and universal. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. S3 

organic, as that still larger body which is denominated 
the race, or that still smaller body which is denomi- 
nated the state. It exhibits a process possessing all 
the properties of an expanding germ, and has a his- 
tory which is vitally connected, and reciprocally 
related, from beginning to end. 

We pass, now, to consider the characteristics of 
this process of restoring the true development of 
human nature, in order to obtain a yet fuller appre- 
hension of the distinctive peculiarities of Church 
History. 

1. Observe, first, that the development of regenerate 
man, here upon earth, is only imperfectly normal. It 
differs from what it would have been, had human 
nature unfolded from the original germ, without any 
fall, or deviation from the prescribed career, by exhibit- 
ing a mixture of true and false elements. The church 
on earth, is not perfect. Its career contains sections 
of corruption, decay, decline ; characteristics that can- 
not belong to a perfect process ; elements that do nol 
belong to Church History in its narrower sense, of 
denoting only what ought to be the process, consider- 
ing the perfection of the germ from which it proceeds. 
For inasmuch as the potential basis, in this instance, 
is the perfect Revelation of God, the development that 
proceeds should upon abstract principles be an entirely 



84 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

perfect one also. Since the inward life is supernat- 
ural and divine, the manifestation ought to be so 
likewise, and entirely unmixed with foreign and false 
elements. 

But the actual history of the Church, does not thus 
exactly conform to this its ideal. It only approximates 
to it, and hence the restoring of the true development 
of humanity, is not that pure and spotless process, 
which the history of man was originally intended to 
exhibit, and which it would have, presented, had the 
first divinely designed unfolding taken place. The 
history of the Christian Church, though vastly different 
from that of the secular world, though different in 
kind from it, is by no means that perfectly serene 
and beautiful evolution which is going on in the 
heavenly world. 

Church History, consequently, as we actually find 
it, exhibits a complex appearance, a double move- 
ment. It is both the expansion of a true, and the de- 
struction of a false, evolution. As, in the instance of 
the individual Christian, the career consists of a double 
activity, the living unto righteousness and the dying 
unto sin, so in the instance of the Church, the entire 
history consists of the growth of the spiritual and 
holy, and the resistance of the natural and sinful. 
The fight between the flesh and the spirit, in the sin- 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 85 

gle believer, is both a part, and a symbol, of that 
great contest between two opposing principles, which 
constitutes the charm of Church History, and renders 
it, for the contemplative mind, by far the most inter- 
esting, as it is the most important, part of the Univer- 
sal History of man on the globe. 

Hence, although we pass into the sphere of the Su- 
pernatural, into the midst of supernatural ideas, germs, 
and forces, on passing from Secular to Sacred History, 
we yet by no means go into a world of calm. We 
enter a world of thicker moral storm, and of hot- 
ter mental conflict, than is to be found in any sec- 
tion, or in the whole range, of Secular History. But 
there is this great difference : the storm is destined to 
become an eternal calm, and the conflict to end in an 
eternal triumph. This complexity, in the process, is 
destined to become a simple unity, and this antago- 
nism a perfect harmony. The dualism, in the now 
imperfectly normal history, is ultimately to vanish, and 
God is to be all in all. But so long as the church is 
militant, and until it enters upon its eternal heavenly 
career, it cannot exhibit that unmixed, and pure, pro- 
cess of holy life and growth, which the history of man 
was originally intended to be. The secondary restor- 
ing of a normal development is not, like the primary 
unfolding, a tranquil and unhindered process ; and this 

8 



86 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

is the difference between the history of an unfallen, 
and that of a regenerate, spirit. 

2. Notice, in the second place, that the develop- 
ment in Church History is not symmetrical. We see 
the same lack of entire harmony, in the life of the 
church, that we do in that of the individual believer. 
No christian biography exhibits a perfect proportion in 
the features of the religious character, or a perfect 
blending of all the elements of the christian expe- 
rience. The man is either too contemplative, or too 
practical, too vehement, or too tranquil. There is 
but one individual religious life, that is completely 
symmetrical, and that is the life of the Divine found- 
er, and exemplar, of Christianity. There are, indeed, 
different degrees of approximation to this ideal sym- 
metry. Some characters are much more proportion- 
ate, and beautiful, than others, but there is not a sin- 
gle one of them all, that is so exactly conformed to 
the Divine model, as to be an exact reproduction of 
it. Ullmann speaks of a point in religion, beyond 
which any further improvement is, not only impossi- 
ble but, inconceivable. He describes it, as being that 
completed oneness of the human soul with God, in 
which the former is determined in all its movements, 
and moulded in all its experiences, by the latter, and 
yet feels that this determination, and moulding by the 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 87 

Divine, is no pantheistic absorption, nor external com- 
pulsion, but its own most free, and personal, self-de- 
termination, and self-formation.* But no christian 
biography discloses such a perfect christian conscious- 
ness as this. The holiest saints oit earth complain 
of inward conflict and an interest separate from God, 
mourn over a part of their experience, as that of in- 
dwelling sin, and confess, that even on the holy side, 
there is too much that is ill-balanced, and dispropor- 
tionate. Not one of them can apply to himself, in 
their highest unqualified sense, these words of St. 
Paul, " I live, and yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." 
Not one of them has been a perfect representative, 
in his earthly life, as he will be in his heavenly, of 
the symmetrical holiness of Jesus Christ. Precisely 
the same is seen in the larger sphere of the Church ; 
for the individual life is the miniature of the general, 
the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm. As we trace 
the historic development along down the ages and 
generations of believers, we rind the same, greater or 
less, appoximation to symmetry, but never absolute 
proportion. 

If we look at the history of Christianity upon its 
practical side, we find it an imperfectly symmetrical 

* Studien und Kritiken, 1840. p. 48. 



88 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

process. There are indications in the Apostolic epis- 
tles, themselves, that the gushing love, and glowing 
zeal, of the Apostolic church, sometimes passed over 
into an extreme, that injured the experience. The 
strong side of the character of the early Christians is 
their vivid life and feeling, and not a discriminating 
knowledge of the christian system, or of human nature 
at large. They apprehended truth chiefly in the way 
of feeling and experience, and expected to find their own 
warm affection for it, in every one who professed dis- 
cipleship. Hence their liability to be deceived by false 
teachers, and their readiness to be led astray by false 
doctrine ; traits to which the Apostolic epistles often 
allude, and against which they seek to guard, by a 
more thorough instruction of this glowing love, and 
cautious guidance of this ardent zeal. Paul, speaking 
to the Roman church, of those who by good words 
and fair speeches would deceive the hearts of the sim- 
ple, (afcatccov, the artless and guileless good), adds, " I 
would have you wise unto that which is good, and 
simple concerning evil."* In writing to the Corinthian 
church, he enjoins it upon them not to be children in 
understanding ; in malice they might be children, 
utterly unacquainted with any such thing, but in un- 

* Romans, xvi. 18, 19. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 89 

derstanding they must be men.* The frequent warn- 
ings, against false teachers and doctrine, in the epis- 
tles of John, we need not specify. So liable was the 
guileless simplicity, and pure love, of the Apostolic 
church, to be imposed upon ; so defective was this 
first form of the christian experience, on the side of 
knowledge ; that the Head of the church, made up 
for the deficiency, and protected his people by a special 
Charism, or miraculous gift, viz : the power of discern- 
ing spirits, of reading the inward and real character 
of pretended teachers of Christianity. 

When we pass from this first age, to a succeeding 
one, like that between Constantine and Hildebrand, 
or, still more, like that between Hildebrand and the 
Reformation, we find the christian character defec- 
tive in just the opposite respect. Speaking compara- 
tively, as we always must when comparing historic 
periods with each other, we may say, that the sim- 
plicity and love have been lost in the extreme of 
knowledge and discrimination. The adoption of 
Christianity by the temporal power, secularized it, and 
while the first Christians were too ignorant of men 
and things, the Grecian-Roman, and the Roman- 
Catholic, church knew them too well, for the guile- 

* 1 Corinthians, xiv. 20. 



00 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTOftV. 

lessness and simple love of a symmetrical christian 
character. They obeyed the first half of our Lord's 
injunction, but not the last. They were wise as 
serpents, but were not harmless as doves. 

If again we look at the historical development of 
Christianity, on the theoretic side, as a system of 
doctrines, we find the same defect in the process. — 
Some ages undervalue knowledge altogether, and 
exhibit little or no scientific interest of any kind. - — 
Others are almost exclusively speculative. It is as 
impossible to find an age, as it is an individual, in 
whom <yva)GL<i and maris, light and life, knowledge and 
feeling, are mingled in exact proportions. Hence the 
whole series of periods and ages, contains more of 
the lineaments of a perfect symmetry, than any single 
one of them does, and the full idea of Christianity 
approximates nearer to a full embodiment, in the 
Church Universal, than in any particular branch of it. 

This, therefore, is a proper place to allude to the 
error, of selecting some one ecclesiastical period, as 
the model for all time, and some one church, as the 
ideal for all churches. It is a false view of history, 
that would set up the church of the two centuries 
preceding, and the two centuries following, the 
Nicene council, as that one particular section, by 
which the church of the present, and the future, 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 91 

should form itself. The attempt of the Oxford party, 
in the English church, to revive Nicene Christianity, 
as the normal type, was utterly unhistoric as well as 
irrational. That period undoubtedly had its excel- 
lences, and just as undoubtedly its defects. Its Chris- 
tianity lacked a perfect symmetry. It can, therefore, 
furnish only some features that are to be imitated, and 
perpetuated, by the church of the present, and the 
church of the future. Its determined opposition to 
heretical conceptions, and its comparatively vigorous 
missionary spirit, are two characteristics of this period 
that deserve to be reproduced in all coming time. — 
The church, in this pantheistic and rationalistic age, 
should keep fast hold, of those statements of the doc- 
trine of the Trinity, and of the Person of Christ, 
which had their origin in this period. The church, in 
this, and in every age, should retain the substance of 
those profound anthropological views, which were the 
result of the great controversy between Augustine and 
Pelagius. But surely no mind, that has any just 
conception of the spiritual nature of Christianity, can 
desire that such views of prelacy and primacy, of 
celibacy and monasticism, of the efficacy of the sacra- 
ments in connection with the meritoriousness of good 
works, as prevailed in this patristic period, should be 
recommended to the church, in all time, for servile 



92 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

reception. He who follows the history of the Chris- 
tian Religion, from its beginning down to the present, 
will not go to the Nicene period, for the most accurate 
statement of the doctrine of justification by faith, or 
for the most scriptural conceptions of the nature of 
christian virtue, and of ecclesiastical polity. He 
knows of other periods, whose more special and suc- 
cessful function, it was, to unfold these latter doctrines, 
as it was that of the Nicene period, to construct the 
doctrines of Theology and Christology. 

As really, though not equally, is it an error to set 
up the Apostolic church, as the model for all time. — 
That brotherly affection, and that tender yet deathless 
love towards the Redeemer, must be a model for all 
ages, and will probably never be excelled by any gen- 
eration of Christians. But the conflict which Chris- 
tianity has to wage with a cultivated skepticism, and 
a subtle heresy, and that prudent discrimination which 
is needed, in some emergencies, to protect the earthly 
interests of the church, call for a development of 
Christianity in an intellectual and scientific direction 
of which we see little or nothing in the Apostolic 
brotherhood.* The primitive Christians were, in 
reality, the pupils and children of the apostles, who 

* This Church might say, in reference to scientific statements of the 
doctrines of Scripture, as the unlettered woman spoken of in Chalmers' 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 93 

answered all their questions, relieved all their doubts, 
and fought all their intellectual conflicts for them. 
But the apostles were an order of men which has 
not been perpetuated, to be the guardians and instruc- 
tors of the church in every emergency. Their writings 
are left, it is true, but how often would even the 
didactic and thoughtful theologian, or the learned 
but perplexed council or assembly, after all its diligent 
study of these writings, have gladly betaken them- 
selves, like the church at Corinth or Rome when in 
difficulty, to the inspired mind of a living apostle, for 
a further communication specially adapted to the case 
in hand. This age of pupilage could not continue, 
and therefore it cannot be set forth, any more than 
any other one, as the model to which all after ages 
are to be conformed in every respect. 

tn short, the student of the whole course of his- 
torical development will seek to make up for the 
want of that symmetry which is not to be found in 
any one section, by combining excellences that are 
found in each, and rejecting the defects that are 
found in all. For only in the career of the church as 
a whole, does he find the nearest approximation to 

memoirs, did, when asked some theological questions respecting the 
person of the Redeemer, on her examination for admission to the 
church : " I cannot describe him, but I would die for him." 



94 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

that church " without spot or wrinkle," spoken oi 
in Scripture, and of which Divine Revelation is the 
originating power and perfecting principle. 

3. Notice, in the third place, that the development 
in Church History is not uniform in every part. 

This duplicity in the restoring process, of which we 
have spoken, hinders the movement. If there were 
only a single divine principle, and no remainders of a 
sinful human one, in the regenerated soul, the entire 
career of the christian church, would be one unin- 
terrupted onward motion, one continual triumph of 
truth on the earth. But the religious life is enfeebled, 
and diminished, by the carnal and secular, in both the 
individual, and the church. In one age Christianity 
is vigorous, and its rapid extension into pagan regions 
is the consequence. A succeeding age presents the 
melancholy spectacle of decay and decline in these 
parent churches, and, perhaps, the beginning of the 
same process in the newly formed societies. North- 
ern Africa from the second to the fifth century was 
the seat of a very vigorous religion, both in practical 
and speculative respects. Tertullian, Origen, and 
Augustine, represent a Christianity as influential as 
any that lies back of the Reformation. But these 
North African churches disappear from Christendom, 
with the suddenness of the lost Pleiad from the sky, 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 95 

and, from the time of the Mohammedan invasion to the 
present, that whole region has no place in Church His- 
tory. Such a phenomenon as this, cannot be accounted 
for by external crises. Terrible as the Saracen invasion 
was, a civilization and culture resting upon a sound 
and healthy Christianity, in Northern Africa, would 
have stopped, and beaten back, the Saracen, as instan- 
taneously, and decisively, as he was by Charles 
Mattel and his warlike Franks. History, secular as 
well as sacred, shows, that no form of heathenism, or of 
worldly power, can compete with a true and genuine 
Christendom. But an interior process, of decline and 
decay, had gone on in the very heart of these churches 
and this christian society. The moral and intellec- 
tual strength, had departed, along with the pure 
scriptural piety of the founders, and first witnesses, 
and the whole population fell an easy prey to the 
fanatic zeal of the Mohammedan. Instances like this 
throng upon the mind, but a single one is sufficient 
to show, that the external development of Christianity 
is constantly liable to interruption in parts and sec- 
tions of the entire career. The same fact stares us in 
the face, if we look at its internal history. Compare 
the present condition of the Eastern church, with 
what it was, when it took the lead of the Western ; 
when its Athanasius was the theologian, and its 



96 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

golden-mouthed Chrysostom the orator, for all Chris- 
tendom. If this church could, this day, be put back 
fifteen hundred years, it would be in advance of its 
present position. The development has been inter- 
mitted for this length of time, and will continue to be, 
until an infusion of fresh life, through the missionary 
efforts of Protestant churches and the Divine blessing 
upon them, occurs. 

4. Notice, in the fourth place, as a sequence from 
these defects, in the development, which we have 
mentioned, that in ecclesiastical history we can 
affirm a normal progress only as we view the church 
as a whole. Truth and piety are unfolded in the long 
run of ages, though not necessarily in each and every 
one of them ; in the general run of churches, though 
not necessarily in each and every one of them. — 
Though the process is hindered, turned aside, and 
temporarily stopped, by the corrupt {rec agency of 
man, it is yet, as a whole, under the guidance and 
protection of God, and therefore goes on ; if not in 
this nation, and age, yet in another. "We know, from 
the promise of the Author of Christianity, that his 
religion is destined to a far wider extension, among 
men, than has yet been seen ; and upon this we must 
ultimately rest, in order to maintain a confident expec- 
tation that such will be the fact. Much is sometimes 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 97 

said of the self-realizing power of Christianity, but 
unless we identify the system with its Author ; unless 
we think of the Word and the Spirit of God, as one 
undivided agency ; we cannot read certain chapters 
of Church History, with any firm belief, that even 
revealed truth will continue to expand with genial 
life within the hearts of men, and exert a continuous 
and mighty influence age after age. Take away 
from Christianity the doctrine of the Holy Ghost, and 
the very life of the system disappears. Take away 
from Church History, the actual dispensation of spir- 
itual influences, and the vitality of the process de- 
parts. And it is because the Holy Spirit has never 
left the church as a whole, while He has suspended 
his quickening influences in sections, that we can say 
with the strictest truth, that the progress of the great 
whole has been continuous, though sometimes inter- 
rupted in the parts. 

5. Notice in the fifth place, that the development 
of a section or an age, in Church History, is often only 
the reproduction of some preceding type. When 
Christianity has declined, in a particular branch of 
the church, the reformation that takes place, is, really, 
only the restoration of a previous form of vital godli- 
ness. It is not, however, the mere copy of an antece- 
dent period, containing no more and no less elements, 

9 



98 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

and in just the same proportions. History exhibits no 
fac similes. There is no copying in a living process, 
but there is reproduction, and a great amount of 
it. The Protestant Reformation was the revival of 
that genuine doctrine, and holy life, which had mani- 
fested itself once before in the church of the first 
five centuries. And yet, it was not a mere fac simile 
of it, because the corrupt elements, in doctrine and 
morals, which began to come in particularly after the 
union of Church and State under Constantine, were 
expelled by the newly awakened religious life. The 
feeling of guilt, moreover, was more keen and poig- 
nant, and the appropriation of atonement more intel- 
ligent and cordial, than in the patristic period. Still, 
it was in the true sense of the word, a re-production, 
and it called itself a re-formation. The aim of Luther 
was to restore a piety that had once before been the 
glory and strength of the Church, and not to invent 
any new style of christian life. Probably, in the 
outset, his desire was merely to make the Roman 
Catholic church what it was in the first three centu- 
ries, before the Romish bishop had become the Romish 
pope. And it was not until he saw, that the Romish 
Church of 1517 was radically different, in doctrine 
and in practice, from the Roman Church of o50, and 
radically different from that invisible church to which 



THE P II I L O S O I' II V OF HISTORY. 99 

he himself belonged, in common with the holy of all 
ages, that he understood the true relation of the invis- 
ible to the visible, and became the instrument in the 
hand of God of continuing the life of the church 
invisible, or the true Catholic church, under a new 
outward organization. The ecclesiastical progress 
which Luther desired for the age in which he lived, 
was a return to an age that lay more than a thou- 
sand years nearer the first promulgation and spread 
of Christianity. 

If we turn to the theology of the Reformatory pe- 
riod, the same fact meets us. The two theologians 
of this age were Melancthon and Calvin. Examine 
the " Loci Communes " of the one, and the " Insti- 
tutes " of the other, and see the substantial reproduc- 
tion of an earlier theology. From the beginning to 
the end of the Institutes, in particular, there is a con- 
tinual appeal to Augustine. Calvin, though of sin- 
gularly strong and independent mind, and thor- 
oughly convinced that the Scriptures are the only 
infallible rule of faith and practice, and thoroughly 
acquainted with them through a most exhaustive exe- 
gesis, nevertheless uniformly cites the cxegetical and 
systematic opinions of the Latin father as corrobo- 
rative of his own. And the relation between the two 
systems, is not merely that of confirmation and cor- 



100 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

roboration. So far as human influence was concern- 
ed, the one grew out of the other, and the other formed 
the one. Thus was it regarded as a progressive ad- 
vance, by the leading spirits of the Reformation, to 
revive an antecedent form of faith and practice, and 
in the sixteenth century to return to the first five cen- 
turies. 

Do we not in these facts find an incidental, but 
strong, corroboration of the position, that Church His 
tory is a process of organic development ? Some- 
thing more than mere chronological sequence, without 
action and reaction, is needed to account for such 
phenomena as we have been noticing. If the move- 
ment of Christianity in the world, were merely recti- 
linear, straight forward in one line, we ought to find 
each succeeding age possessed of all that the preced- 
ing had possessed, together with something more of 
its own. In this case, the last must be wisest and 
holiest of all. But such is not the movement. The 
motion is circular, and spiral, rather than straight on- 
ward. The process is organic, and not mechanic, or 
mathematical. The line returns into itself, so that, 
as in the old philosophy, it is the circle, and not the 
right line, that symbolizes the living process. 

It is from this rectilinear rather than spiral concep- 
tion, this mechanical rather than organic idea, of His- 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, 



101 



tory, that the common fallacy arises, of supposing 
that each age, as matter of course, contains all the 
development of the past, merely because it happens to 
be chronologically last in the series. This error rests 
upon the assumption, that juxta-position and location 
determine everything in History, and that a man liv- 
ing in the nineteenth century is wiser of course than 
one living 'in the seventeenth, because nineteen are 
two more than seventeen. This would be the case, if 
History were not an organic process, in which, a part 
that has come into existence last in the order of time, 
is very often inferior and degenerate in point of qual- 
ity. The latest blossoms are not always fruit blos- 
soms. We have seen that in any organism whatever, 
the parts are reciprocally means and end. Each 
exists for all and all for each, so that no one part can 
be exalted to a supremacy over all the others. Hence, 
in History there is a continual inter-dependency. No 
one age is superior to all others. Some past periods, 
in the history of the church, have been in advance of 
the present in some particulars. The present is never 
in advance of all the past, in all respects. The age 
of the Reformation was in advance of the nineteenth 
century, in a profound and living apprehension of 
the doctrine of justification by faith. The best Sote- 
riology is derived from the sixteenth century. The 

9* 



102 T H K l'HI L O S O P H Y O F HISTORY. 

creeds of the Reformers, in connection with the practi- 
cal and theoretical writings by which they defended and 
explained them, have been the chief human instrument 
in forming the present Protestant theory of Redemp- 
tion. The present age, on the other hand, has advanced 
greatly beyond the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- 
ries, in respect to the application of Christianity to 
the wants of the world, and the exercise of a practical 
missionary spirit. Thus, one age is the teacher of 
another, the pupil of a second, the stimulator of a 
third. In some way or another, each of the historic 
sections sustains a relation of action and reaction ; 
and in and by this interagency, the total process of 
evolution goes forward. Looking at the parts, we 
find them deficient ; looking at the whole, we find it 
approximately complete. 

At this point, then, let us retrace our steps, and 
succinctly state the results to which we have come. 

In the first division of the subject, we obtained the 
definition of Abstract History. We found it to be 
development in the abstract ; a dynamic process mere- 
ly, without any qualification, in which the connection 
of parts and elements is necessary, natural, and or- 
ganic. This is the most general idea, and is capable 
of being applied to each and every particular species 
of history, be it in the domain of Nature or of Spirit. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 103 

But inasmuch as it is universal and abstract, it does 
not, of itself, determine the character and value of the 
process. It simply indicates that it is an evolution 
from a potential basis, but with the specific qualities 
of this, the abstract conception has no concern, and 
hence the doctrine of expansion is applicable, indiffer- 
ently, to a latency that is good, or to a latency that is 
evil ; to a germ originated by the Creator, or to a germ 
originated by the creature. This rigorously abstract 
conception of the idea, precludes that imperfect and nar- 
row apprehension of it, which insists, either expressly 
or tacitly, that every germ is of necessity good, and 
that all development is an inevitable normal process. 
In the second division of the subject, we have ob- 
tained a definition of Secular History. This we have 
found to be a particular species of development ; that, 
viz : of a false germ. The common and profane his- 
tory of man is an illegitimate process, but none the 
less an organic one, to which the doctrine of expan- 
sion applies with its fullest force. The difference be- 
tween the actual and the ideal unfolding of human- 
ity, relates not to the continuous nature of the pro- 
cesses themselves, but to the specific difference be- 
tween their potential bases. The germ of the latter, 
is the creation of the infinite will, while that of the 
former, is the product of a finite faculty, in its fall 
from God. 



104 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

Ill the third division of the subject we find a second 
concrete species of history ; that of the Christian 
Church. The foundation of this, is laid by a super- 
natural power, which is strictly creative, and as such 
re-originates the lost principle of spiritual life in the 
apostate creature. From this germinal point, under 
the maintaining and educating energy of the same 
Divine power that established it, a new development 
of humanity commences, which gradually destroys 
and expels the relics of the false germ, and though 
hindered and imperfect in its stadia here below, runs 
its round, and becomes a perfect and serene evolution 
in eternity. 

Neither one, of these two concrete processes, can 
be or become a potential basis for the other. Each can 
proceed only from its own germ. The origination of a 
false germ in the place of the expelled true one, and 
the restoration of the true one in the place of a dying 
false one, are, both of them, events that cannot be 
accounted for by the theory of development. There 
is no passage in the way of expansion, from one to 
the other basis. 



LECTURE IV. 

THE VERIFYING TEST IN CHURCH HISTORY. 

Having now determined and applied the idea of 
development, and thereby come to an understanding 
of the nature of both abstract and concrete History, 
the second question mentioned in the first lecture, viz : 
how may we verify our a priori conception in any 
particular instance ? still remains to be answered. — 
This introduces to our notice, the general subject of 
tests in History. To follow out this subject into all 
Jts branches, would carry us far beyond the limits we 
have prescribed for ourselves, and we shall accordingly, 
as in a previous instance, confine the discussion chiefly 
to ecclesiastical history. 

Lord Bacon, in the Novum Organum, teaches that 
" the sciences require a form of induction capable of 
explaining and separating experiments, and coming 
to a certain conclusion, by a proper series of rejections 
and exclusions." * This " form of induction, " in other 
places he terms a " method," or " clue," by which the 

* The distribution of the work. 



106 THE P1I1LOSQPHY OF HISTORY. 

mind is to be led through the bewildering multitude 
of phenomena and experiments, without being con- 
fused by their variety, and deceived by their contra- 
riety.* By it he means that correct a priori conception 
of a thing, in the light of which, the inquirer is to 
detect all that properly belongs to it, and to reject all 
that does not. The reader of Bacon is struck with 
the frequency with which he speaks of " rejections," 
and " exclusions," in the investigation of nature. He 
everywhere assumes that there is a complexity, a mix- 
ture, and to some extent a contrariety, in this domain, 
that renders some foregoing tests necessary, in order 
that the true materials lor science may be discrimin- 
ated from the false. It is not enough to employ the 
senses in a merely passive manner, and see all that is 
visible, and accept all that is offered ; to allow the 
stream of facts and appearances to flow along by the 
mind, and simply describe what has passed. Bacon's 
phraseology often implies an inducing of the mind 
into the senses ; an introducing, into this complex 
aggregate of sensational materials, of a mental or 

* "We must guide our steps by a clue, and the whole path, from the 
very first perception of our senses, must be secured by a determined 
method." Preface to the Novum Organum. 

"Nothing can be known, without'a determined order or method." 
The distribution of the work. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 107 

rational principle, that is to simplify and organize ; in 
short, an induction of a method or an idea inwards, as 
well as a deduction of particular conclusions outwards.* 
Opposed as this sagacious and thoroughly English 
mind was, to the unverified and mere conjectures of 
the fancy, such as the alchemists, e. g., employed in 
investigating nature, he was not opposed to the 
initiating ideas, and pre-conceived methods, of the 
contemplative scientific mind. The fictions of occult 
qualities, and hidden spirits, he rejected, but his own 
map of the great kingdom of nature, with his full list 
of a priori tests and capital experiments, to guide the 
inquirer through a region which he has not yet 
travelled over, and in which Bacon himself had 
entered only here and there by actual experiment 
and observation ; this example of Bacon, shows that 
he regarded the sober and watchful employment of 
the a priori method, by the scientific mind, to be not 
only legitimate but necessary.f 

* " The form of induction of which the logicians speak, which proceeds 
from bare enumeration, is puerile, and its conclusions precarious." The 
distribution of the work. 

" The logicians rest contented with the immediate information of the 
' senses.'" The distribution etc. 

" Our method rejects that operation of the mind which follows close 
(i. e., servilely) upon the senses." Preface to Novum Organum. 

t See his " Sylva Sylvarum," and " Preparation for a natural and 
experimental history." 



108 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

Such a " form of induction " is needed in history, 
in order that the investigator may make the requisite 
detections, adoptions, rejections, and exclusions. For 
this science is not a miscellany of all that has hap- 
pened. The historic spirit is not an undiseriminating 
one. The historian needs to reject as well as to 
accept ; to distinguish the normal from the false devel- 
opment ; to detect the element of error in the mass 
of truth, or the element of truth in the mass of error. 
It is not enough merely to daguerreotype an age ; to 
simply hold up a mirror that passively reflects all that 
occurred. This is the Chronicle, but not the History. 
It is an exceedingly interesting and dramatic manner 
of representing the past, and furnishes the materials 
for the proper history. All true history has found 
its stuff in this minute, and passive, representation 
of the chronicle. Grecian history took its beginning 
in that body of narrative poems and legends, which 
extends from Homer to Herodotus, and though this 
latter is styled the father of Grecian history, yet the 
student feels, on passing from that easy and childlike 
credulity which records everything with equal serious- 
ness, to the searching and philosophic criticism of 
Thucydides, that with the latter the history, as distin- 
guished from the chronicles, of Greece begins. Roman 
history springs out of the legends of the monarchical 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 109 

period, and such annals as those of Fabius Pictor, and, 
we must add, such narrative as that of Livy. English 
history derives its matter from the prose and metrical 
chronicles of the monks from 600 to 1300. Now if 
it were the great aim of the historian, to merely depic- 
ture the past exactly as it was upon its surface ; to 
place the reader in the process as an actor, and not 
above it as a judge ; certainly the chronicle would be 
the true and highest form of historic narrative. Read 
the chronicles of Froissart, and see with what minute 
fidelity everything is related, and with what dramatic 
vividness, and interest, the scenes of pacific and of war- 
like life are made to pass before the mind. But why 
are we unsatisfied with this account of the contest 
between France and England in those centuries, and 
why can we not accept it as history ? It is because 
there is in the narrative none of that discriminating 
spirit, which is able to elevate the important and 
depress the unimportant ; to let the causes of events, 
the ideas and forces of the period, stand out with bold 
prominence. Because in short, the chronicle teaches 
none of the lessons, and exhibits none of the philoso- 
phy, of history. 

It is plain therefore that the historian must carry an 
idea, a method, in the phrase of Bacon, a " form of 
induction," into the world of human life, as well as 

10 



110 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

into the material world, if he would exhibit its deep 
meaning and significance. By this he will be able to 
distinguish the causes from the effects, and to present 
them in their proper proportions and relations to each 
other ; to refer the phenomena to their grounds, and 
make the latter prominent above the former; to con- 
dense minor and unimportant matter and expand 
what is fundamental, and especially to detect and 
show what belongs to the process of true historic 
development, and what does not. 

The position which we are endeavoring to establish 
has been very clearly and conclusively stated by one 
of the most profound of English writers, and we con- 
clude this introductory part of the discussion by an 
extract from him. " A very common mode of inves- 
tigating a subject," he says, "is to collect the facts 
and trace them downward to a general conclusion. — 
Now suppose the question is as to the true essence 
and character of the English Constitution. First, 
where will you begin your collection of facts ? where 
will you end it? What facts will you select, and 
how do you know that the class of facts which you 
select are necessary terms, and that other classes of 
facts, which you neglect, arc not necessary? And 
how do you distinguish phenomena which proceed 
from disease or accident, from those which are the 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. Ill 

genuine fruits of the essence of the constitution? 
What can be more striking, in illustration of the utter 
inadequacy of this line of investigation for arriving at 
the real truth, than the political treatises and constitu- 
tional histories which we have in every library ? A 
Whig proves his case convincingly to the reader who 
knows nothing beyond his author; then comes an old 
Tory (Carte, for instance), and ferrets up a hamper- 
ful of conflicting documents and notices which prove 
his case per contra. A. takes this class of facts ; B. 
takes that class ; each proves something true, neither 
proves the truth, or anything like the truth ; that is, the 
whole truth. 

We must, therefore, commence with the philosophic 
idea of the thing, the true nature of which we wish 
to find out and exhibit. We must carry our rule ready- 
made, if we wish to measure aright. If you ask me 
how I can know that this idea, my own invention and 
pre-conception, is the truth, by which the phenomena 
of history are to be explained, I answer, in the same 
way, exactly, that you know that your eyes were 
made to see with ; and that is, because you do see 
with them. If I propose to you an idea, or self-realiz- 
ing theory of the constitution, which shall manifest 
itself as an existence from the earliest times to the 
present ; which shall comprehend within it all the 



112 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

facts which history has preserved, and shall give them 
a meaning as interchangeably causes or effects, princi- 
ples or phenomena ; if I show you that such an event 
or reign was an obliquity to the right hand, and how 
produced, and such other event or reign a deviation 
to the left, and whence originating, — that the growth 
was stopped here, accelerated there, — that such a ten- 
dency is, and always has been, corroborative, and 
such other tendency destructive, of the main progress 
of the idea towards realization ; if this idea of the 
English constitution, not only like a kaleidoscope, 
shall reduce all the miscellaneous fragments into or- 
der, but shall also minister strength, and knowledge, 
and light, to the true patriot and statesman, for work- 
ing out the bright thought, and bringing the glorious 
embryo to a perfect birth; — then, I think, I have a 
right to say that the idea which led to this is not only 
true, but the truth, and the only truth in the case. To 
set up for a philosophic historian upon the knowl- 
edge of facts only, is about as wise as to set up for a 
musician, by the purchase of some score of flutes, fid- 
dles, and horns. In order to make music you must 
know how to play ; in order to make your facts speak 
truth, you must know what the truth is which ought 
to be proved ; the ideal truth ; the truth which was 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 113 

consciously or unconsciously, strongly or weakly, 
wisely or blindly, intended at all times.* " 

What then is the "form of induction" which we 
are to employ as our method or clue, to lead us 
through the mighty maze of materials in the history 
of the Christian Church ? What is the antecedent 
idea, or self-verifying theory, with which we are to 
test and clarify the historical data in this depart- 
ment of inquiry, and how can we be certain that it 
is the true one ? These are the questions now before 
us. 

The brief and most general answer to them is, that 
the true idea of Christianity is the key to the history 
of the Christian Church, and this true idea is furnished 
by the Scriptures. 

We have seen in a previous lecture, that the founda- 
tion of Sacred History is Divine Revelation ; that the 
inmost life-power which restores the true development 
of humanity, and the inmost law which regulates the pro- 
cess, are the influences of the Divine Spirit allied with 
the doctrines of the Divine Word. If this is so, it fol- 
lows that only revealed elements belong to the true 
history of the church, and that all that is anti-scrip- 
tural should be detected and eliminated. The test, 

* Coleridge's Table Talk, (slightly altered). Works, vi. pp. 443-44. 

10* 



114 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

consequently, which the inquirer is to apply to the 
complex, and, as we have seen, somewhat heteroge- 
neous materials that meet him on all sides, is the test 
of the written revelation. We have seen that the pro- 
cess of restoring a lost normal development, is a dual 
one, because the expulsion of the relics of a false 
germ is going on contemporaneously. The history of 
the church is imperfectly normal, not entirely symmet- 
rical, frequently interrupted, and nearer perfection as a 
whole than in sections. This would not be the case, if 
the infallible and perfect revelation of God had found 
a full realization of itself in the church. It follows con- 
sequently that this very revelation, itself, is to be used 
as the " form of induction," the antecedent norm or 
rule, by which conformity and agreement are to be indi- 
cated and approved, and by which deviations and con- 
trariety are to be detected and rejected. In short, the 
student of Church history is to provide his mind with 
the Biblical idea of Christianity, and to use it rigor- 
ously, as the crucial test, while he examines the 
materials ; while he examines the forms of polity and 
of worship, the varieties of orthodox and heretical doc- 
trinal statement, the methods of defending Christian- 
ity, the modes of* extending Christianity among un- 
christianized nations, the styles of life and morals, the 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 115 

specimens of individual christian character. Through 
all this complex and perplexing mass of historical 
matter, the true Scriptural idea and theory of Chris- 
tianity is to conduct the investigator, so that he may 
see the true meaning and worth of the facts and phe- 
nomena, and set a proper estimate upon each. That 
we may see the imperative need of some such guide, 
let us look at a single class of phenomena ; a single 
series of facts. We find a polity, a church constitu- 
tion, in all the ages of the Christian church. There 
is the Jewish church-constitution ; then the exceed- 
ingly slight and almost invisible constitution of the 
Apostolic church of the first forty or fifty years after the 
death of Christ ; then the more consolidated republi- 
canism of the close of the first and the beginning of 
the second century ; then the dim beginnings of the 
episcopate followed by the established primacy of 
the Roman bishop in the "Western church, and of 
the Constantinopolitan bishop in the Eastern ; then 
the absolute monarchy of the Romish pope, and the 
ecclesiastical despotism of the mediaeval polity ; then, 
since the Reformation, the revival of all but the last 
of these forms of polity in the various branches of the 
Protestant church, together with the continuance of 
the Papacy and the Patriarchate. 

Here, now, is a mass of conflicting facts and phe- 



116 THE PHILOSOPHY OP HISTORY. 

nomena, upon which it is necessary to form a truly 
historic judgment. It is not enough to take the 
position of the annalist and chronicler, and simply 
exhibit the facts, without any philosophic estimate of 
their intrinsic and relative value. Neither is it enough 
to give a vivid and dramatic picture of all these fea- 
tures, and parts, of the total process, and nothing 
more. The historian must set a proper estimate upon 
each and all, and deliver a judgment regarding them. 
He must say, and show, which of these forms of 
ecclesiastical polity is most congruous with the spirit- 
ual nature of Christianity. He must be able to say, 
and show, which of them deviates most from the 
general christian idea of church government, and 
which is positively contrary to it. He must be able 
to say, and show, which grew out of a false and cor- 
rupted apprehension of Christianity, and so tended to 
perpetuate the error in which it had its own birth. 

But how can he say and show all this, in reference 
to this mass of historical facts and phenomena, and 
how can he say and show the same in reference to 
the whole entire mass of historical materials, if he has 
not, clear and bright in his own mind, the true idea 
and theory of Christianity itself; that Divine idea, 
which is to be seen struggling for realization through 
all this ocean of elements ; that Divine theory, which 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 117 

is being executed feebly in this section and powerfully 
in that, which is resisted in this age, and cherished in 
that, but which, in the entire sequence of ages and 
the whole sweep of years, is going on conquering and 
to conquer ? And how is he to have this idea and 
theory clear and bright in his mind, leading it like the 
Beatrice of Dante, through the Hell, Purgatory, and 
Paradise, of history, except as he derives it from the 
fixed and unchanging written revelation, in which it 
is distinctly enunciated and explained ? 

We say distinctly enunciated and explained; for 
notwithstanding the difficulty of interpreting certain 
portions of the scriptures, and the many controversies 
that have arisen within the church, respecting the 
real mind of the Spirit, the written revelation so 
plainly teaches one general system of religion, that 
its prominent and distinctive features are to be seen 
in each and all of the various forms of evangelical 
doctrine that have appeared in the Church Universal. 
Even when this general system is overloaded with 
human inventions and additions which positively con- 
tradict and nullify it, or tend to crush it to death by 
their materialism, there is sometimes enough of it still 
left to show that the original formers of a symbol were 
nearer the Biblical system than their successors, and 
found less difficulty in detecting in the Bible a com- 



118 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

mon teaching and creed. The creed of the Papal 
church, though not evangelical upon the distinctively 
evangelical doctrine of justification by faith, is yet in 
advance of the present religious character and teach- 
ing of that body, because it still retains some of those 
scriptural elements that were incorporated into it in 
the better days of this church. And hence in modern 
times ; since the Protestant Reformation, and undoubt- 
edly under the influence that has radiated from the 
scriptural faith, and purer practice of the Protestant 
churches ; men like Pascal, and parties like the Janse- 
nists, have endeavored to effect a reform within the 
Roman Catholic communion, by cutting off the 
excrescences of tradition, and letting the original 
scriptural stock, imperfect as it was, grow on by 
itself. All the attempts at reform within a corrupt Chris- 
tianity like that of the Romish, and the Greek, church, 
are implied proofs, and tacit confessions, that the 
written revelation is clear and unambiguous in its 
general teachings. For there could be no endeavors 
to get back to a conformity with an original directory 
like the scriptures, unless it were believed that there 
is such an one, and that its directions are plain to 
the candid and truth-seeking mind. As matter of 
fact the symbols of the various churches, are nearer to 
each other than their theological tracts and treatises 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 119 

are, because they are derived more immediately from 
scripture data : the Bible being not only a unity, but 
unifying in its influence. 

Hence we say that the idea of Christianity, which 
the inquirer is to take with him into Church History, 
can be, and must be, derived from the scriptures them- 
selves and alone. If it were a secular historic process, 
the preconceived idea need not necessarily be derived 
from a supernatural revelation. In the instance of 
the English Constitution, cited above, the investigator 
takes a purely human idea with him, as he follows 
the constitutional history of England down from age 
to age. This idea is no other than that organic law 
of the realm, of which jurists speak, and which is not 
to be referred to a specially supernatural source, but, 
to the spontaneous operation of the natural reason of 
man. The same is true of all secular, as distinguished 
from sacred, history. The inquirer is not in the region 
of the Supernatural, and hence although the light that 
is thrown upon profane history by the Divine revela- 
tion is indispensable to seeing its deeper and more 
solemn significance, it is yet not the sole light in 
which it must be viewed. 

But in Church History the light of revelation is the 
sole light by which to see, and the revealed idea and 
theory is the sole preconception by which the mind 



120 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

of the inquirer is to be guided. He who reads the 
history of the church in the light of that Divine truth 
which lies at its foundation, will not read amiss. He 
who constructs the facts, and builds up the account, 
by the method and plan furnished by the written 
word, will rear the structure in its true proportions. — 
He who takes scriptural Christianity, as the "form of 
induction " by which the true elements are to be 
discovered, and wrought into the account, and the false 
elements are to be detected, and expelled from it; 
the "form of induction" by which the tests are to be 
applied to all the facts and phenomena, and the cor- 
responding adoptions and rejections of good and bad 
materials are to be made ; he who rigorously applies 
this scriptural idea, will investigate the history of the 
church in such a manner as to convey the real lessons 
which it teaches. All ecclesiastical history composed 
in such a manner will be catholic and exactly true. — 
It will not be made to serve the interests of any par- 
ticular sect, for it will impartially, as do the scriptures 
themselves, expose all deviations from the truth of 
God, though within its own sphere, while it will faith- 
fully report and depict all conformity to that truth, in 
whatever age or country it may be found. 

And this brings to our notice, the necessary and 
natural connection between Church History and 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 121 

Dogmatic Theology. The two sciences are recip- 
rocally related, and mutually influence each other. — 
For this pre-conception, derived from the scriptures, 
of the nature of Christianity, whose leading Church 
History follows, is, for substance, that doctrinal system 
which the theological mind has formed by the scientific 
study of the written revelation. Notwithstanding all pro- 
fessions to the contrary, every writer of ecclesiastical 
history, as well as of secular, has his own standing point 
and view-point. This can be inferred from the spirit and 
teachings of his work, as unmistakably as the position 
of the draughtsman can be inferred from the perspec- 
tive of his picture. Who can mistake the political, 
philosophical, and theological, ideas which Hume 
carried with him from the beginning to the end of his 
history of England? Would a whig theory in 
politics, a platonizing instead of a pyrrhonizing men- 
tal philosophy, and a christian instead of a deistic 
theology, have read the facts in the career of the 
English state and church as he has read them ? Who 
cannot see the difference belween the rationalistic and 
the supranaturalistic conception of the christian 
religion, as he reads the ecclesiastical histories of 
Semler and Henkc on the one hand, and those of 
Moshcim and Neander on the other ? In all ages the 
written history of Christianity is very greatly affected, 

11 



122 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

and modified, by the prevailing theological spirit and 
bent of the historian. 

But on the other hand, dogmatic theology is greatly 
affected and modified by the history of the church. 
Creeds and systems that are formed without much 
knowledge of past symbolism, are apt to differ, some- 
times in minor and sometimes in essential respects, 
from creeds and systems that breathe a historic spirit. 
Thus the relation, between the two sciences of theo- 
logy and history, is not that of mere cause and effect, 
in which the activity is all on one side, and the pas- 
sivity all on the other. It is rather an organic rela- 
tion, of action and reaction, in which both are causes 
and both are effects, both are active agents and both 
are passive recipients. 

But, in this connection, it is important to notice, 
that the Scriptures stand above both theology and 
history, as the infallible and unchanging rule by which 
both are to receive their ultimate formation. We as- 
sume, and believe we are correct in so doing, that the 
systematic theology which the christian mind has de- 
rived from the written word, agrees with the real 
teaching of this unerring source of religious truth. 
Still the scientific christian mind is not infallible, and 
it is possible for it to deviate from the matter of 
Scripture. Hence the need of a continual reference 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 123 

and recurrence to revelation, on the part of dogmatic 
theology. Again, the experimental consciousness of 
these doctrines in the mental and moral life of the 
church, is not of necessity, and beyond all possibility 
of deviation, a perfect and normal experience. This 
historic christian life needs the guidance, and often 
the rectification, of the revealed canon. Neither dog- 
matic theology nor the historic movement of the chris- 
tian mind can safely be left to themselves, without 
any protection from the written word. Even if each 
should be carried along for a time by its own momen- 
tum, upon the right line, the side influences of the 
remaining corruption and darkness of human nature 
would soon begin to draw it aside, and the deflection 
would soon be plain and great. The actual career 
of some branches of the church proves, that unless 
there is a constant recurrence to the written word, 
both in theoretical and practical theology, a corrup- 
tion of both theory and practice is the natural result. 
Those who would substitute tradition and the voice 
of the church for the Scriptures, as well as those who 
would substitute the christian experience itself for 
them, commit the same error in common. The Ro- 
manist and the Mystic are really upon one and the 
same ground, and are equally exposed to that cor- 
ruption of Christianity to which every human mind 



124 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

is liable which does not place the Scriptures above 
both the teachings of history and the christian con- 
sciousness, whenever the question concerns an ulti- 
mate and infallible source of religious knowledge. 

While, therefore, we believe that ecclesiastical history, 
both as it occurs and as it is written, is modified by 
the theology which prevails, and the theology which 
prevails is in turn modified by the knowledge of the 
past history of the church, we also believe, that the 
two cannot safely be left to their own inter-agency, 
and inter-penetration, unless both are all the time feel- 
ing the influences of the infallible revelation in which 
they both have their origin. Two streams may mix 
and mingle never so thoroughly, yet, unless the foun- 
tain is constantly pouring into them, their own mere 
motion cannot keep them pure, any more than it can 
keep their volume full. The idea of Christianity is 
therefore to be kept full, pure, and bright, in the head 
of the theologian and in the heart of the christian, 
by the written word, which has been preserved for 
the church, in order that, amid all the grades of 
knowledge and consequent varieties of experience 
that might arise within it, there might be a rule of 
faith and practice which, like its Author, should be 
without variableness or shadow of turning ; because 
what is written is written. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 125 

By thus finding the Baconian "form of induction," 
or ultimate interpreting idea, for Church History, in 
the Scriptures solely, yet not refusing to employ the 
helps for understanding them afforded by the general 
theology, and the general religious experience, of the 
Church Universal, we avoid that fault which we re- 
gard as on the whole the most serious defect in 
Schleiermacher and his school ; the fault, namely, of 
an undue subjectivity. For this school, the christian 
experience, or " consciousness," has a worth and im- 
portance in both dogmatic and historic constructions 
to which it is not entitled. In the reaction against the 
dead orthodoxy of the eighteenth century, they have 
practically undervalued the written objective revela- 
tion. We say practically, because in theory they 
thoroughly adopt the Protestant maxim that the Bible 
is the only infallible rule of faith and practice. Yet 
the student of a theological system like that of 
Schleiermacher, and a history like that of Neander, 
finds that the organization of the former and the con- 
struction of the latter, are actually determined more 
by an appeal to the living consciousness of the 
church than to the written word of God. The doc- 
trinal development in the one representation, and the 
historical development in the other, is too much a 
self-determination of the christian mind and soul, with 
11* 



126 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

too little reference to the correcting and regulating 
influence of that Divine truth in which all christian 
experience must find its norm. The historian does 
not exhibit with sufficient fullness, the influence 
which the inspired canon has exerted upon the unfold- 
ing of the christian life. The process of Sacred His- 
tory is regarded, too much, as self-directed. Hence, 
the general undervaluation of strict dogmatic state- 
ments, as cramping the movement of the free chris- 
tian spirit, the leniency towards certain heretical ten- 
dencies, and the occasional hesitating tone as well as 
vagueness of vision in respect to scientific orthodoxy, 
which characterize the best complete history of the 
christian religion and church that has yet been 
written. 

What is needed is, more objectivity ; more mould- 
ing by that fixed Object, that unchangeable Word, 
whose function it is to form the changing experience 
by its own fixedness and immutability. Conscious- 
ness cannot be an absolute and final norm for con- 
sciousness. It is the object of consciousness, by which 
the process of consciousness is to be shaped and deter- 
mined. Inasmuch as that subjective process of faith 
and of feeling, which is seen in the christian church, 
owes its very existence to the objective revelation, so 
it must be kept pure from corruption and error by the 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 1 27 

same, and be criticised and estimated by the same. 
To leave the process to test itself, and to protect itself 
from corruption, is not safe! An individual Christian 
who should trust to the feelings of even a regenerate 
heart, and the inward light of even a renewed mind, 
without continually comparing this subjective feeling 
and knowledge with the written word, would be the 
victim of a deteriorating, and, probably in the end, an 
irrational and fanatical experience. Much more then, 
is it unsafe to set up the christian experience, as the 
ultimate source of christian science and the final 
test of christian development, either in the particular 
or in the universal church. 

Hence the Church historian must guard against 
two extremes. He must not, with the Rationalist, 
magnify the individual reason and the private judg- 
ment, to the disparagement of the general reason and 
judgment of the universal church, by disregarding or 
despising the historic faith and the historic experience. 
On the other hand he must not, with the Roman 
Catholic, seek the ultimate source of religious knowl- 
edge in a Iradition theoretically co-ordinated with 
revelation, but practically supreme over it, nor with 
the Mystic Theology, attempt to find it in a " christian 
consciousness " which, like all forms of consciousness, 
is fugacious and shifting, and therefore liable to 



128 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. 

deterioration. These two extremes, involving three 
species of subjectivity, will be avoided by him who 
does not regard either the individual or the general 
christian mind as upon an equality, in any sense, with 
the Scriptures, but believes that both the individual 
and the church, in all ages, are to be subjected, both 
in respect to doctrine and experience, to the tests of a 
wisdom more unerring than that of the best and wisest 
of human minds or of human societies ; the wisdom 
of an infallible inspiration. 



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